Gan Eden
A team project based on our experience in Berlin. I was in charge of the outside garden, it's foliage assets and the weird tree in the greenhouse.
The project
On our trip to Berlin, we had a single task. To experience, and take notes of our senses in those moments. Based on our memories and notes, we were taskes to make a game capuring the feeling we had in one of our experiences!
We saw plenty of things, but decided to make our game about the wonder of the botanical gardens, combined with the overwhelming and uneasy evening to the exclusive club Berghain.
Walktrough
You, the tourist photographer, have stumbled into a gorgeous, sunny botanical garden. You are tasked with taking pictures of the 3 sights to see. The greenhouse is not one of them.
There are strange noises coming from the greenhouse, and it’s always lurking in your vision somewhere. If your curiosity gets the better of you, you’ll find a developing intense techno experience with strobelights which comes to a dizzying cresendo in front of a strange tree.
If you choose to ignore the greenhouse, you can leave the beautiful garden after having taken all pictures. What a nice trip!
The map
When designing the garden layout, I had to think about the greenhouse. It had to draw the attention in a subtle way, so you would be confronted with it, but it shouldn’t be trown in your face. Ideally, the players should have a 50/50 entering rate.
I accomplished this by putting the greenhouse in the centre, and by making the paths so you would have to walk by it.
I kept the height of the foliage in mind, so the greenhouse would peek out or be obscured by it. Low foliage is in light blue and high/dense foliage is in red. The green spots are the POV’s where the player would be fully confronted with the greenhouse.
The final layout has changed, but still has the key features of the sightlines.
Foliage
I created the flowers, bushes and trees for another project as well as this one. Check it out here!
These models were created with the tutorials of Victoria Zavhorodnia. After getting familiar with the workflow by working on the easiest mesh (the foxglove), I gradually worked on harder meshes and figuerd out my own ways of making the meshes. For example, the cornflower has a unique structure, which was fun to translate to 3D.
The flower textures were handdrawn, and the shader udes UV height to simulate the wind strength. As a result, I had to keep in mind that the top parts of the flowers would be placed high in the UV space.