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

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

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

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.

Additionally, there has been a trend of 3D retro games being released or developed, particularly with a fantasy setting.

And even pre-rendered backgrounds have seen a rise in interest.

This has encouraged me to continue this style going forward.

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 which could be useful in my development

Hoek and Zagal’s analysis of Metroid produced a useful framework that broke down the challenge of navigation into destination, routing, and execution

Johnson’s chapter on Resident Evil had some interesting commentary considering the player’s need for mental mapping, which links to lots of traditional cognitive theory

And Maleki’s paper reveals the potency and versatility of utilising knowledge as a gating tool in exploration

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