Merzouga

Game Pitch:

You work in Tetradimensional Pilgrimage Insurances.  You have to find and rescue any survivor of a colossal crash, that has happened in the Merzouga Desert. In this extraterrestrial place, temperatures are really extreme! Without water, you can die in just a few minutes! 

You would need to extract water from wherever you imagine if you want to succeed today at work. Survive and rescue all the survivors you can.

           -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Level Design:

+ Open World Level (players can decide how to explore a BIG desert full of secrets)

+ Map Size: picture a square where you need 5 min of waking from one corner to another + another square of 1 min. Visual reference: last screenshot)

+ Zelda, breath of the wild's "gold rule" to maintain player's flow is also applied here: every 20 seconds or less, players are used to finding something interesting to interact with. For example, there are secret water spots (in this game you need tons of water to survive and rescue people), enemies, sandstorms, NPCs, etc.

+ There are a lot of dead bodies near the 4 crash sites. The 20 survivors are located all over the map but especially in the crash sites. The player can send a fast-speed robot to detect survivors.

             ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the game concept (one page):

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kFfueGMKe5_J4M3mRTm712_LGuR4hFy7/view?usp=shari...

             ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Technical Highlights:

- Dynamic shadow check (you can protect yourself from the merciless sunlight in every shade or shelter. They are also checkpoints)

- Tool for placing N meshes randomly in a dynamic area. Used for placing rocks and thousands of corpses all over the desert.

- 4 different AIs characters: Giant Worms, Wolfs, a Fox Companion and a Tracker Robot using state machines and a custom AI controller.

- Level Streaming implemented using dune's ascensions to to charge every level (during a dune ascension players can't see what's in the front). If you see the last screenshot, the main map is divided into 8 areas.

- Level optimization: level streaming, actor's dynamic activation, checking mesh polygons, tweaking the project settings, etc.

- There is a low-cost intro cinematic at the beginning of the adventure (you can see it in the trailer)

- VFX: sand material, desert heightmap, wormhole vfx, player traces on the sand, player sicknesses due to the extreme hot.