Eternal Wanderer - Lotus Palace
During my graduation project, I designed and modeled the Lotus Palace for Eternal Wanderer, the central building in the game. The palace symbolizes the narrative of a corrupted king who manipulates human lives to evade karma's consequences. As players approach, the palace visually transforms, shedding its facade to reveal the king's hidden ambitions and your quest to stop him.
For more information about the game we're creating, please visit: www.inktvlek.com
- Some assets, such as the character pack, were not created by me and were sourced from the Unity Asset Store.
Before reaching the Lotus Palace, players must follow a path towards their goal, experiencing visual changes along the way. Some art that is visible here was made by Dara van Vliet: www.artstation.com/daragray
These designs were created after researching Hindu temple architecture, with some regional, Indo-Islamic, and Buddhist influences. To determine which design felt most traditionally Indian, I consulted Indian people on Reddit and in our personal network.
Here are some blueprints of the areas required in the Palace for gameplay purposes. Ultimately, I decided to only create the exterior of the Lotus Palace.
In this concept art I created, you can see how the palace transforms from a radiant structure into ruins. This artwork played a key role in guiding my 3D modeling work.
The ruined palace. I still need to incorporate the normal textures shown in the concept art. Additionally, the palace's color was completely changed to create a stronger impact on the players.
The Transformation: Together with my team lead, Ravi, we developed a shader that changes the palace's color based on the player's distance. It was exciting to see this feature come to life when we implemented it in Unity.
Here you can see the three stages I designed to gradually reveal visual signs of corruption in the environment and the palace itself.
This is the current experience within Unity, showing what my playtests looked like during the project's development.
And finally some keyshots that correspond with the phases shown on the map to the left.