Elijah Porter
Role
Level Design, Game Design, Implementation
Overview
Overgrown was SCAD's first collaborative yearlong project conducted within the Game Design major. The project was also led alongside SCAD's animation department. The game focuses on a botanist named Lily fighting her way through an overgrown museum of natural history!
Work
Pre-Production
- Worked on creating a key for all future documentation.
- Worked to creative cohesive designs that could be. utilized across tech, design, and art teams.
- Collected references and worked with our concept team to put together finished concepts before reaching greybox.
- As documentation and design progressed continued updating our key with newer icons.
- Played around with the idea further of backtracking and verticality.
Greyboxing
- Greyboxing was a little tricky for this project as the space was 2.5D but got easier as Overgrown Progressed.
- I started greyboxing the entry of the museum and slowly progressed to exhibits in the zoology area.
- Similar to the pre-production side, as the project progressed so did the intensity and complexity of our greyboxes
- We had to think further about backtracking and where we were going to put key items in the game.
- Design ran into a transition issue between the larger rooms
- To combat this, we designed, greyboxed, and set dressed 20 hallways to connect the rooms
- Designed interactable and combat rooms in the hallways
- While these rooms initially functioned as better spacing between our large rooms they quickly became crucial to the game.
- We started to thoughtfully design items, bonuses, and puzzles that could fit into these rooms.
Atlasing
- As design slowed down I was asked to help our implementation team with importing assets through atlasing.
- While I had never atlased before I was happy to learn and help get the game up and running as soon as possible.
- I ended up collaborating with a team of talented artists.
- Learned how to properly atlas and transfer the atlases into UE5
- Atlased and implemented over 100 different textures
Awards
Overgrown was selected as a finalist for the rookies in 2025!