Wk 5 and 6:

Key Creative and Technical Showcases and Decisions.

As a group, this fortnight all the artists were tasked with creating their own mood boards to help us define where we wanted to go for our art direction. Then, through sharing our findings together, we iterated on those initial ideas in order to narrow down our mood and tone of the game.

We had a two-hour dev meeting where we chose a camera angle. We contemplated our options on what would work best to accentuate our film noir inspired art direction. We were given the suggestion to explore an isometric camera angle, and that is what was decided on.

Aesthetic Influences.

Cinematic Influences.

Real World Influences.

The Scent Mechanic:

The goal of this mechanic was to create a system that could guide the player through areas without explicitly telling them what to do. So that they could still explore the area without getting overly lost.
The basic setup was easy, using Unreal's built-in navigation systems to find the path through. The difficulty came with trying to feed those points into a spline to spawn the scent effects evenly along the path. It ended up being a simple fix with the use of multiple arrays.

While the mechanic has basic functionality now, the plan is to have it working with multiple potential points on the map. As such, we will need to run a check to find the closest navigable point.

Spline path spawning placeholder scent effect.

Spline path and effect spawning blueprint

Player controller - crouching

This mechanic was added to provide the player with a way to crouch under obstacles to get to new areas and as a tool to avoid enemies. It allowed the player to become smaller to get under areas that would otherwise be unreachable. This was achieved by setting the player scale to half if the crouch input was toggled. Additionally, the crouch state is removed if the player either jumps or sprints.

First iteration of camera angle - isometric

The first iteration of the camera angle for Waybound was proposed by our producers. The camera was a 45-degree isometric angle with orthographic projection. It followed the player and didn't rotate. While the angle would reduce workload with assets and allow for a lot more to be visible on screen, there have arisen a lot of issues with depth perception. From a design perspective, objects obstruct the player and the game loses a lot of its intentional claustrophobic and 'lost' atmosphere as a result.

The Cell Shader and Black and White Post Processing:

As a very art heavy game, we wanted to establish the visual identity of Waybound early on. Charlee, our tech artist got started on creating a cel shader and post processing volume that would bypass certain sketch layers so that we could achieve that monochrome look we want.

Attached to the post processing volume, this shader uses an if statement to check if the enabled sketch layer per object has a number higher than 0. If so, it skips over it and allows the asset to be rendered in colour. Items with a layer number of 0 will be rendered in black and white.

Early cel shader -- Charlee, 2026

Concept Art:

Our goal with the concept art was to explore what we wanted the city to look like, mainly exploring shape language, and architecture based on different regions and time periods. The main struggle we encountered was deciding on a style for the city. We took quite some time after these weeks before we landed on a style. If we were to change this next time, we would make sure to develop more concept art with a wider variety of options sooner also exploring things such as camera angle sooner would have helped us in the long run.

Mikayla Munkman, 2026

Oliver Hocking, 2026

Mikayla Munkman, 2026

Oliver Hocking, 2026

Samantha Watson, 2026

Narrative Development:

During these two weeks, we established family relationships as the narrative core and confirmed a text-free storytelling approach — relying entirely on environmental storytelling and dialogue-free cutscenes. Together with the art team, we finalized the overall scene design style and available narrative resources (cages, scratches, fur). We completed a full story outline in segmented node structure, with detailed expansions for Demo sections including the opening sequence and mechanic introductions.

Screen shot of the first script draft

We Initially struggled with script scope control. Cross-team communication with art and programming required adjustment and the text-free, environment-driven narrative style was a new territory for the team. To resolve this however, we broke down each act into finer segments for clearer workload allocation, established weekly Wednesday meetings -- and occasionally additional ones where required -- to align narrative direction with art and programming. Finally, we studied animal documentaries for non-verbal expression references, and gathered visual narrative resources to build a shared vocabulary.

Production Highlights and Challenges

As a group, we struggled a lot with the decision of a camera angle. While majority were set upon a 3D, over the shoulder view, our producers requested isometric. Isometric becomes a challenge because it forces us to reshape our themes and take a lot more time on developing a design that works well. We do want to try and challenge ourselves though, so we've made an effort to work on in-game cameras, as well as conceptual mock-ups.

Despite this we are all extremely optimistic. We have developed a really strong direction for our narrative so far and we are looking forward to continuing forward with production.

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