Project: Megastruct
This was a project for a speculative game that myself and a few friends were making for a short time. Unfortunately the project proved difficult to fund and so we moved onto other commitments. But I was happy to sink my teeth into a project that allowed me to build a world and suggest a narrative from the ground up.
This project's narrative was set within a giant megastructure, each level was set within a different chamber that housed its own microcosm biome, host to creatures and puzzles for the player to overcome.
The player character is supposed to be juxtaposed to most of the environments of the game, making them feel alien within the structure. Using a mysterious multitool, ripped from the structures innards as a means of combat and traversal.
I wanted the environments to come across as self-sustaining despite being within the bowls of a megastructure. And that the alien biospheres are slowly reclaiming the space and thriving. A lot of that imagery is posed through broken down machinery.
Some exploration of environments melded into the surrounding machinery. I wanted to give a sense that not everything might be natural, almost like the player is in a simulated environment of sorts.
Here are some thumbs of environments that the player could find themselves in at points of the story, they were intended to explore different moods for levels before and established narrative. In this one the player finds an incubating creature.
This level centered around the player avoiding the searchlight of a robot.
This level was a bossfight of sorts, set within a perpetual forestfire, the player confronted with a creature immune to the flames.
The project's narrative culmination hosts a confrontation with the AI that controls the megastructure and trapping the player within.