Major Project I

25/9/2025 - 4/1/2025 / (Week 1 - Week 14)

Chen TianYao / 0367550

Major Project 1

Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media

Google Drive Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p9umygoL2YCeSfHwNcVcU2Xr5ladrk3D?usp=drive_link

Doc Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nUUIExLTvTpzswKdTCIgGL5wID0Ctr7eUGM7j5r1630/edit?tab=t.6bu19ry9zabe

INSTRUCTION

Weekly Document

Project Brief

Over the past few weeks of discussion, we carefully deliberated on core elements such as gameplay, art style, and worldbuilding, and ultimately decided to develop a Unity-based game titled Formal Death, alongside its official Artbook. The game's world draws its inspiration from Dante's vision of "Limbo," featuring 3D top-down combat gameplay, with an overall art direction defined as Semi-realistic — balancing realistic detail with stylized expression.

Week3-Week9

In recent weeks, we officially began work on the game's character and environment design.

The image above shows our designed game protagonist — an elderly man with a weathered, careworn face and neatly side-parted short hair. He wears a double-breasted coat, gripping a massive greatsword horizontally with both hands — yet despite his age, he carries himself with striking vitality and energy.

The images above show our monster design drafts. We explored a variety of different concepts and directions, then selected several of them to develop into more refined, detailed illustrations.

I selected these images for detailed refinement. The finalized artwork will be used both in the game's Artbook and within the game itself.

The image above shows the game map we designed, illustrating four distinct regions within the game — starting from the Withered Forest, progressing to the circular ruins where the first boss battle takes place, then through the village, and finally arriving at the depths of the castle.

Following that, we moved into the modeling phase. The three images above show the environment modeling process and its final output — a small test island, which we named "Test Island."

With the presentation drawing near, we also began working on the Player's 3D model.

All of our models adhere strictly to the PBR (Physically Based Rendering) standard, following a pipeline of Blender (modeling / UV unwrapping / rigging) → Substance Painter (texturing) → Unity (engine integration).

Medium Presentation Slide:

After the Medium Presentation, we shifted our focus toward environment design. Using the previously created modeling assets in combination with Unity's real-time renderer, we rendered the images shown above.

The image above shows a ruin located within the forest, situated in the initial map area — the Withered Forest.

The image above shows Test Island, which has since been incorporated into the official game map.

The image above shows the outskirts of the village.

The image above shows one of the buildings in the village, which also serves as the game's title/startup screen.

The images above show the four fish-people monsters we designed, which inhabit the village.

Final Presentation Slide:

Final Artbook Submission:

Reflection

This Major Project — spanning character and environment design, modeling, texturing, rendering, and final integration into Unity — was a thorough and grounding learning experience.

During the design phase, I came to understand more deeply that design isn't just about looking good, but about serving the world-building and gameplay. Every round of reworking and iterating on drafts was really about refining the logic behind each character and scene. On the modeling side, working through the PBR pipeline — from Blender to Substance Painter to Unity — taught me how much rigor each step of asset creation demands: a mistake in topology, UV unwrapping, or materials can throw off the final result. And bringing assets into Unity for real-time rendering made me realize that the line between art and technical work is far blurrier than I'd assumed — the two need to work in close coordination to achieve the desired outcome.

Beyond that, this project was also a real test of teamwork and time management: maintaining communication, aligning on standards, and delivering on schedule under a tight timeline was a challenge throughout. Overall, this experience gave me tangible growth in both technical skill and collaborative ability, and it's left me more confident about continuing to pursue a career in the game industry.