Environment: Circle of Calamity

Circle of Calamity is a walkable, interactive real-time environment made in Unreal Engine as my group capstone project at Seneca College. This experience was showcased at Level Up on April 19th 2024. The group projects in our final semester were chosen based on Brian Pohl's random number generator prompt through the use of d6 and d12 dice, which determined the themes we would be using to build our environments.

Our team was tasked with creating a school environment with Romanesque architecture, ice/gem materials, prehistoric influence, apocalyptic deterioration, and a setting that included twilight, auroras, and aliens. All of this is in a surrealist art style and hyper-saturated colour palette. This was a daunting task, to say the least, and we ended up taking some artistic liberties, but we managed to create a very bespoke rendition of the original prompt.

After careful consideration of the themes as the Project Lead, I came up with this prompt to guide our process:
"An ancient occult school studying signs of the apocalypse unknowingly beckons an alien invasion. The player must search the abandoned school for clues and end this extraterrestrial threat."

There are many interactive texts throughout the interior which reveal the main objectives such as destroying the statue to recover relics, and placing these relics on the sacrificial altar. There is even an easter egg side quest involving eating cheese scattered throughout the level.

The entire environment was created by our team from planning to production in industry standard tools such as Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter/Designer, Unreal Engine and Houdini. The landscape textures and foliage assets were acquired through Quixel Bridge. SFX were sourced from Pixabay and Freesound.org, as well as ElevenLabs.

In addition to being Project Lead, I acted as an Environment Artist, Narrative Designer, Game Designer, and Storyboard Artist.
Ege Can Çevik was our Lead Level Artist, Environment Artist, and Technical Artist.
Yahya was our Lead Prop Artist, Environment Artist, VFX Artist, and Cinematic Artist, and Interactive Developer.
Please give my teammates the recognition they deserve, this would not be possible without them.

https://www.artstation.com/kaptanego

https://www.artstation.com/ykassab