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The Compound

Story:

'The Compound' is a first-person 3D narrative-driven mystery / thriller, where you play as a character that's been sent to an Arctic Research Station to find out what happened to the missing research team. Using the logs and reports left behind, you'll start to put together the events that took place leading up to your arrival and learn what really happened out here in the cold.

Inspirations:

Gameplay took a lot of inspiration from games like What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home, Alien: Isolation and Resident Evil 7 as well as movies such as The Thing, The Shining, and The Lighthouse. The Art Style was based on several stylized games such as Firewatch, Dustborn, Life is Strange, and Winter Project, which have a low-poly / toon-shaded look to them.

My Role & Collaborators:

For this project, I had 5 main roles: Story Development, 3D Modelling & Texturing, Illustration, Sound Design, and Cutscenes.

Story Development: Starting the project, we each had to pitch 3 ideas, and through a few rounds of voting, we eventually decided on my idea for a mystery game set in an Arctic Research Station, where you would uncover the story of a father suffering from third man syndrome who started to see his dead son out in the snow and started to go mad with grief from it. From there, alongside a couple of my teammates, we developed on and fleshed out this idea so that what they were working on at the research base tied into the story.
3D Modelling & Texturing: This was the main the focus of the project, so it was a role that we all undertook. The models I took on were the books, lockers, one of the phones, and anything involving nCloth (the beds & clothes) as I had some prior experience with it.
Illustration: I drew the maps, framed photos, and headshots for each of the characters, as well as the early concept art for the project.
Audio Design: Here I was responsible for implementing the sounds and music into the game from FMOD, and ensuring that the triggers, code, and volume controls all worked worked for the 3 kinds of audio we needed to play (audio that would only play once, audio that would loop, and audio that needed to repeat several times on command). This was my first time using FMOD, and I was lucky enough to work with some very talented people from the NFTS' Sound Design and Composing course - Simon Panayi (SD), Luke Barnfather (SD), Conor Thompson (SD), and Aaron King (C).
Cutscenes: Using Unity's Cinemachine feature, I put together the intro cutscene and both ending cutscenes. As this was my first time using the feature, it involved a lot of trial and error but gave me an opportunity to practice with this very useful tool.

Above, you can watch a full playthrough of the game.

Below are some code excerpts, early concept art, screenshots of the unity project and FMOD file, as well as a few turntables of the props I modelled / textured (see each's individual notes for which bits I was responsible for).