This is Duo Teikoku Valley Pilgrimage, a game demo set in a dark fantasy world where two omnipotent empires have met at an abyssal chasm and remain stagnant in an unending stalemate.

This iteration centres around a pilgrim that the player must assist in their journey through ancient buried ruins and across the chasm.

This project is an expansion of my previous work researching retro game design in my bachelors dissertation, applying that and creating the world of Duo Teikoku in my bachelors final project and studying gated exploration in my research paper this year.

I chose to research that subject in my paper with the intention of improving my understanding and creating a toolset to be able to apply it in a future expansion of the Duo Teikoku game concept.

The idea for this world comes from my fascination in huge historical architecture and exploring them in games and reality.

Additionally, there has been a trend of 3D retro games being released or developed, and an interest in pre-rendered backgrounds in particular.

In my research paper, I coined the term “gated exploration” to describe the style exploration found in games such as Metroid, Resident Evil, and Dark Souls.

This paper highlighted a variety of game design details pivotal in the successful implementation of this design philosophy, such as distinctive location design, structural modulation, and evolution of the player and their environment.

Mark Brown’s Boss Keys YouTube series was particularly influential due to its wide range of case studies and design details selected, as well as creating the dependency chart turned out to be incredibly useful in development.

Alongside my previous efforts in my dissertation, I have explored retro visuals further by finding tools and techniques for retro visuals in Unity and emulating 90s CGI in Blender for pre-rendered backgrounds.

The project began using Unity, but there was an incredibly effective solution for pre rendered backgrounds in Unreal engine that was too good to forgo, so I made the switch to the original engine used for the previous project

The focus through much of development was efficiency and modularity to make expanding exploration quick and easy

When building the world, I focused on making every model. texture, and structure modular, which had the added benefit of ensuring a consistent aesthetic

I created an ambient occlusion and noise based grunge shader to quickly add depth and variety to everything

I also recreated Unreal engine’s landscape painter in Blender by using vertex colour to automate adding and blending textures

While these required some work to implement, they often paid off in efficiency gains