CITY OF DAWN

Project Brief

Credits: Maja Sayk Sørensen, Colin Michel, Jonas Melgaard Jensen, Xinru Liu Fog, Samuel Mathiesen

The AGD project is a yearly collaboration between Master and Bachelor students at The Royal Danish Academy. The goal of this game prototype is focusing primarily on the artistic side, fx.level dressing, shaping the atmosphere of a doomsday city, environmental storytelling etc. Based on the Planet Junk - a worldbuilding project initiated production designer Alex McDowell, who invites university students to use his "World Building" technique to come up with a future world that is built on the detritus of our current planet.

World Setting

In 2150,  the climate has changed tremendously and land is rapidly decertified. The sandstorm covers almost the entire mainland. Animals and plants are almost extinct. The original human society is almost paralyzed. In the face of the harsh environment caused by various natural disasters on the surface, people chose to compromise and avoid it, giving up returning to the ground, and instead continuing civilization between the mountain walls that can shelter the sandstorm. People began to build shelters on the cliffs, gradually forming a vertical urban structure.After nearly 100 years of productivity and technological recovery, people built giant towers called "Jellyfish" which circulate air and generate the energy barriers to shield the city from sandstorms.

When people finally found a barrier to against sand and dust, sunlight has become a new challenge. Because of the unknown magnetic field, the rotation of the earth stopped, resulting in the birth of the polar day and polar night imagination. It is almost impossible for people to move on the surface under the harmful sunlight in the polar regions. This resulted in people having to migrate down the cliff again, or even dig to the underground. The original building above the cliff gradually fell into disrepair, eroded and weathered under the influence of the wind and the sun. At this time, the Jellyfish stopped working and the barrier is closed. An engineer named Laura returns to the upper area and try to restore the Jellyfish. Through Laura's first-person perspective and exploration, her soliloquies, and clues in each scene, players will gradually be able to piece together the story that happened here.

Art Bible

By Xinru Liu Fog

Software: Publisher, Miro

Concept Art

By Xinru Liu Fog

Software: Paint Tool SAI, Photoshop

3D Assets

By Xinru Liu Fog

Software: Blender, Photoshop

VFX

By Xinru Liu Fog

Software: Unity

My role(s) and responsibilities

• Formulating concepts: 

• create initial concept in collaboration with team members, build the mood board and sketches a rough storyboard based on it.   

• Developed a finished storyboard, with larger and more detailed frames (the individual scenes) in color.

• Supervising production: 

• Work with Art director and 3D artist, and other artistic staff to coordinate all the visual images used in a game. 

• Handle management issues, and oversee the entire artistic production process for making sure all visual aspects of a computer or video game meet the expectations. 

• Create Art Bible to establish the visual language of the setting. Key aspects of this were: the props, the character and the environment.

• Concept art:

• Create concept arts for areas, perspective, scale, color, light, atmosphere, composition, volume, connections and distances between buildings, architectural elements and styles, the tower (landmark), etc. as the visual references for level designer and modeler.

• 3D modelling:

• Created the 3D assets, such as the the main tower, rock, sand pile, tubes, exthust fan, buildings in factory area and the nameplate "DAWN" for the enviroment.

• Created the textures for enviroment assets and painted the rusty effect.

• Imported and implemented art assets such as 3D models and animations.

• Level design:

• Worked with the producer and level designer to establish a flow through the 4 main areas and the main tower that could show the environmental storytelling that we desired

• Designed and sat up the scenography of setpiece items to direct the player's attention and support the main flow through the areas

• VFX:

• Created node-based shaders to solve unique visual cases, for example the light barrier. Sat up the lighting, including: Light sources, light settings, baking and volumetric effects 

• Sat up the different post processing effects, such as tone mapping and bloom, to align the visual aesthetics with the art directors vision

• Worldbuilding:

• Created the general world and story that is shown off in the game, in a collaborative process with my team