"You're a Fisherman trapped in an underwater metropolis.
Harpoon through the fish monsters and get to the surface."
TRAILER COMING SOON
Project: 7
Time: 14 weeks, half time, 280 hours
Reference Game: Remnent II
Group Name: Arcturus Game Studios
Game Engine: Aurora
Level Editor: Unreal Engine & Borealis
Role Overview: Engine, graphics, and editor
Contribution Overview: Physics, visual scripting, and updated renderer
Aurora Borealis, our own game engine and editor was used to create and play the game, and Unreal Engine was used as the main level editor by the level designers.
Atlantean Ascent is the seventh game project at TGA which is still work-in-progress. It is a third-person shooter based on Remnant II and would prove even more demanding of our engine than our previous project, Spite: The Summoning.
The player plays as a fisherman who is lost in an Atlantean city filled with hostile humanoid fish-people. The fisherman only has his harpoon gun to protect himself with as he tries to find his way out.
As we still had work to do on Spite, we chose to only include one type of enemy at first, a melee enemy. We planned to, if we had time, add a second, ranged, enemy. This sadly made it difficult for our level designers as they had to account for the possibility of a new enemy type being added when building their levels without being able to test it.
I, together with David Nilsson, chose to implement node scripting and a physics system, both of which are required for this project.
As the player in this game can move the camera freely, frustum culling, implemented during the last project, would not suffice. It was up to me to find a solution where large parts of the scene could be rendered at once with a descent frame time.
I also worked on our editor Borealis. We, as a group, wanted it to be in a state where we wouldn't need Unreal Engine anymore. My focus was on increasing the usability and adding quality-of-life features.
For this project, we settled on using Unreal as the level editor. Then, use Borealis to add details and decoration, fix lighting, and add gameplay features. We did this as it was difficult to get all the information needed in our engine from Unreal Engine. This workflow did lead to difficulties with iterating on the levels. If a level had to be modified in Unreal, all changes made in Borealis would be for nothing. We hope that we can solely use Borealis during our next project so that this won't be a problem.