Laws of the Jungle
Technical Artist | Interactive narrative exploring the lives of asylum seekers living in Calais. Made in Unity.
2022-05-16 08:00:00 +0000
Laws of the Jungle is a 3D point-and-click videogame, designed to give insight into the life of
asylum-seekers living in a refugee
camp (locals refer to it as ‘the jungle’) using real-life accounts from refugees.
The player is thrown into the role of a detective investigating smuggling rings exploiting refugees in
the camp, who must go
undercover as a low-level patrol officer who enforces dehumanising rules on the refugees,
unintentionally uncovering the systemic
mistreatment of the residents of the Calais Jungle in the process.
In this project, I was responsible for the rendering, technical UI, optimisation, rigging, VFX, graphic
design as well as production.
Lighting & Rendering
We decided that it given the setting of the game in Calais, it would be interesting to pursue the style of French cartoons and illustration like The Triplets of Belleville. The illustrative effect is recreated in Unity’s HD Render Pipeline, using custom postprocessing shaders written in HLSL. It follows the traditional method of creating a cel-shader, by combining a sobel-function outline effect and stepping the colour values.
In order to account for the realistic textures created by the team’s artist, I adapted the shader to dedicate more steps to darker values.
Rigging
I created a simple humanoid rig in Maya for each of the characters given the simplicity of the required animation. However, due to the thick clothing and rigid armour on the characters, I manually painted the skin weights to ensure correct deformation. The low poly model, and the rigid armour crossing over joints made this difficult, but I am pleased with the results.
UI
The UI intends to reflect the themes of the game, whilst not distracting from gameplay but still maintaning readability. The graphics for the UI were created in Adobe Illustrator, and the animations and functionality are written in C#.
Optimisation
The game runs fairly well without optimisations, at around 50fps in editor. However, after some basic optimisations, like removing unnecessary render features, reducing texture resolution for small props, occlusion culling, and enabling the SRP batcher. This brought the frame rate to a consistent 90fps in editor, bringing the performance comfortably beyond the 60fps target.
Credits
Lanwei Lin - Level Design Zoé Magee - 3D Artist Robbie Peden - Narrative Design & Audio Ananth Pondicherry - Programmer Innes White - Technical Artist & Producer Gang Zuo - Gameplay Design