Journey Into the Depths
Battle through shifting chambers in this dark rogue-lite beat ‘em up, mastering dodges, strikes, and fluid combos against relentless foes. Harvest devotion to unlock powerful new abilities, enhance your stats, and discover artifacts that transform your combat style as you fight to conquer the dark.
The Environments
My work
Ideation
Ideation for Vessyl's level design really started with me anylizing other Rogue-lite games such as FTL, Inscription, Binding of Issac, and most importantly Curse of the dead gods to see how their segmented and structured their level design. Taking inspiration from these games helped to define not only the structure of the levels, but their style as well.
Blockout
For rapid iteration of levels, we used a Unreal 5 Blockout tool. This allowed us to efficently scale out and make changes to each level following each playtest. This also saved a massive amount of time out of engine. This allowed us to make over 30 levels in under 6 months.
Visual Pass 1
After prototyping each level, I moved to the grey-boxing and early visual pass. This was by far the longest stage and nailing shape language for the different areas in the game took many tries. After many different attempts, I went back to our ideation mood board and drew from our more natural gothic motifs.
Lighting & Texture Pass
Current Phase
The next and current step is lighting then texturing. With so many levels and different atmospheres in the game, its important to nail a consistent lighting in every room. With the help of Unreal 5's Lighting probes I'm currently working on making custom back end lighting pipelines to ensure that no matter what screen Vessyl is played on, the game looks visually consistent. I'm also working on Texturing with an Ultra-kill style for models within the game to add extra detail.
Visual Pass 2
After levels were approved from a design and styling standpoint, the coloring and lighting process took place. This included adjusting our Post-Processing Pipeline to use blend spaces in Unreal. This enabled us to tune the outline and cell-shading of each separate object in the world allowing us to control the visual noise of each environment.
Release
All of this culminated in an early access release for the game, and a full visual vertical slice for us to pitch to publishers.
The Team
This game is nothing without its team. Working over the past year with Rob, Gil, Pranav, and Ed has been an amazing experience, and I’m so excited to keep building Vessyl as we talk with publishers.
I’m proud to work on Vessyl, but more than that, I want to highlight the long days and problem solving we got through together. Through it all, we weren’t just teammates or co-workers. We were friends. Day in and day out, we made sure to be honest, respectful, and above all else, considerate of each other and the work. If I can get across what Vessyl has taught me its this
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"Connect with people. Share memories. Be friends. That’s what makes a great teammate. Someone who cares. Enjoy what you do with those you enjoying doing it with. Weather its work or not.