*Content Warning*
Images contain blood and gore. Proceed with your own discretion.
Meet Team Echo Interactive
Cristian Astorga - Scrum Master and Programmer
Brendan Barry - Lead Animator and 3D Artist
Eddie Cazares - Programmer
Catherine Crawford - Technical Artist and Hard Surface 3D Artist
Tyler Meador - Programmer and Lead UI Designer
Margaret Rembert (Me) - Organic 3D Artist, Level Designer, and Narrative/Audio Designer
Prathik Srinivasan - Lead Game Designer and Programmer
Links
Playable Game - https://pastel-magpie.itch.io/lab-echo
Project Overview
Play as an archivist who has been tasked to discover the fate of the scientists of the space lab, Echo. Find clues and solve puzzles to make your way through the lab and figure out how it fell into ruin. Will you be able to uncover the mystery of Lab Echo?
Core Gameplay: Mechanics and Dynamics
The core gameplay will be based on investigation and interaction. The player will be able to walk around and pick up objects in the environment from a first-person perspective. Each interactable object can be investigated for details by rotating and observing them and will have associated “clue words” that the player will collect. By combining these clues, they’ll be able to solve the puzzle associated with each scene and understand the mystery behind the occurrences on the space station.
Game Trailer
Concept Art and Moodboard
As the lead narrative designer, I was also tasked with creating the initial concept art that gave us the aesthetic and mood we hoped to present in the game as well as to give some examples of assets we'd need to create; the "main plant" was directly inspired by this concept.
Organic Models
Victims
There are five total victims in Lab Echo, each with their own name and cause of death. In order to make sure the player could gather all the clues they needed, I had to individually model and texture the different types of wounds and character features to match all of their assigned narratives.
Main Plant
The "main plant" is seen throughout the entirety of the lab and is the root cause of the lab's fall into ruin. When designing, I took inspiration from my initial concept sketch but then also added some real-life elements, such as the carnivorous pitcher plant center, to sell this as the destructive plant it is.
Foliage and More
Level Layout and Design Process
Layout Concepts
The first layout (left) was designed to have an extensive narrative with many twists and turns, however, we decided that we needed to reduce our scope. The second concept (right) is closer to my final layout and is what I used as a basis for the rest of the design process.
Whitebox
Based on the reduced layout concept, I designed this whitebox in order to get a better idea of the gameplay flow as well as be able to visualize what assets we needed to make.
Final Layout and Room Aesthetics
The final layout stays pretty true to the initial design with only a few changes to make onboarding smoother for the player.
Each room has a different color scheme based on the mood the player is meant to feel. However, the colors also served as an indicator that the player has progressed, making it so they don't get the rooms mixed up and also giving them a sense of progression and success with each new room unlocked.
