From January to May 2025, I worked as a Lead Artist at ShepherdXR. With two other co-workers, we developed an educational VR Game training math topics from arithmetic to algebra. As a Lead Artist I was responsible for all visual aspects of the game from VFX to Level Design to Post Processing. I designed levels in Unity, 3D models in Blender, coded in C#, and play tested on a Quest 3 headset.
The experience thought me a lot of new technical skills. This is evident when you compare it to my last Unity game Flow. This co-op was my first introduction to terrains, 3D animations, shaders, particle effects, PBR, Post-Processing, and real C# coding. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I was learning a new feature of Unity every week.
Designing environments and levels was my favorite part of the co-op. The project started with minimal visual design (as seen in the far right video), I then decided to decorate it with a natural aquatic environment (as seen in the video to its left). I used a couple prefab packages to block out an ocean floor, deep ocean, open ocean, and coral reef environment based on the real world divisions of the ocean. I took this a step further (as seen in the video to its left) by using Unity's terrain system. I constructed a fully immersive lagoon and seamount environment for the Arithmetic world, and a more fantastical castle and swamp environment with stylized Post Processing for the Mechanics world (covering fractions). Towards the last month of the co-op we iterated on those levels again. We decided to save on processing time and to obtain the desired number of 39 levels, we would have one Unity Scene per world that would house all 12 levels. The video on the far left is me playing all the way through one such level in the Arithmetic World.
In the left video, I fly through each unique level in the final Arithmetic, Mechanics, and Equality worlds. The Arithmetic world is still a natural environment that I structured to branch like ski paths on a mountain with the same reef at the top. The Mechanics world is structured to give the sense of exploring a lost civilization with cliffs that look like towers and shipwrecks featured prominently. The Equality world places the player inside a giant cave above a brine pool and invokes the darkness of space. This is to represent both a turning point in the story, where the player's mentor Ember has vanished, and the reflective nature of a mathematic equality. The Boss world on the right was left unfinished, but would have the player ascend an infinite bridge to the stars. Each milestone they reached in their math would cause a new type of environment to procedurally generate around the bridge (shown here is the space and lighthouse asteroid environment).