Penumbra

Process

Penumbra is a Walking Simulator/Narrative game made for one of my classes at University of Baltimore. This game was made for Google Cardboard/VR. The story will take the player through a journey to find the main character’s dog “Spots”, who gets transformed into a monster and runs away into the woods as a strange eclipse happens.

The River/Pond level was my main responsibility, including the dialogues. Even though the main feeling we wanted to elicit in the player was fear and uncertainty, I was trying to aim my level design to a more relaxed feeling. Something that embodies the phrase “not every ugly situation has to look bad”. Regardless of the couple of monsters around the area, I feel like the river/pond along with the cliffs could potentially make the player feel calm and give them a sense of hope related to the story. I also came up with a simple quest the player needs to do to be able to get to the cave (next level), where they need to collect logs around the area to create some kind of bridge to get to the other side of the pond.

I was proud of the work I did in this level, and I learned a lot about creating high and low areas in a level like mountains, that can be seen in this level, and the lake. There were some areas where I could have improved; like the placement of trees or the little path at the start of the level, and even the placement of monsters. They were supposed to be scary, but due to some technical issues they don’t appear as menacing as I envisioned them to be.

Playthrough

Game Screenshots

Process