The Forgotten Lands
A biome based semi-open world survival and crafting game built with Unity's HDRP.
The Forgotten Lands is an extensive development that is ongoing and is my first real deep dive into the High Definition Render Pipeline. Similar to the likes of Rust and Valheim the player must navigate the world and learn various crafting recipes to advance through the biome and defeat the final boss to progress.
The bulk of time spent on assets in this project was spent on emissive materials and their respective prefabs. The first forest stage takes place in a woodland stuck in perpetual sunset, providing a nice cosy contrast for hot emissive materials like the coals used in the campfire pictured on the right.
Emission was also used to highlight strong enemy threats such as the glowing red eyes of the demon tree, pictured on the right.
World building is a heavy focus of this project, the terrain and environment is painted using ~15 different species of flora which was selected for based upon what species would be present in an alpine forest environment. Ferns and Connifers are ubiquitous throughout the first stage.
Early versions of the game such as pictured to the left demonstrated how effective use of emission can create a cosy and enticing environment which the player would want to spend hours in.
Primary systems of the game involve aspects such as the inventory and item data system which I developed from the ground up. This allows the player to collect, drop and craft items.
The tree set up was also a challenging system to implement. Each tree needed to be instantiated with various components. As there are over 10,000 trees in the first area this caused performance issues. As a workaround I altered the code so that these components were added to trees in batches of 10 per frame working outwards from the players position. This minimised peformance impact and was unnoticable to the player.
