Little Island Parkour is a short first-person parkour platformer based on the real life location of Little Island in NYC. Set years after an apocalypse forced people to inhabit the island and isolate themselves from the world, the island's inhabitants have long since abandoned it. Players navigate this island and the structures its inhabitants left behind to slowly see the truth of what happened to its inhabitants.
2023
Environmental Artist | Concept Artist | Level Designer
Initial Blockout
Paintover Concept Sketch
I worked on this project in a group of three. By the time I entered this project, we already had a refined blockout, so much of my responsibility ended up being making multiple art passes through the blockout, creating a modular kit to replace the blockout and allowing for further iteration, creating decals to texture and decorate the space, and creating a hero piece as the guiding monument for the player.
The modular kit consists of three main types of pieces: cargo container, sheet metal shanty walls, and wood palettes/planks.
Shanty walls are made up of modular pieces that can be rearranged to form many variations on walls.
base color map - reduced size for web
normal map - reduced size for web
AO, Roughness, Metallic - reduced size for web
shanty roof
base color map
normal map
AO, Roughness, Metallic map
in-game modular block
Wooden assets in Substance
base color map
normal map
AO, Roughness, Metalic
in game
in game
cargo container in substance
container body base color map
container body normal map
container body AORoughnessMetallic map
container door base color map
container door normal map
container door AORoughnessMetallic map
The creation of this kit involved a tight process between making it easy to replace the existing "playgrounds" while preserving the tight feel of the gameplay, but also giving rise to a modular process to create new platforming sections and modifying existing ones. The first step to this was creating a system of metrics that both works well within the game's controls but is also visually convince to the player's first person perspective. I closely followed this section from the Level Design Book and this GDC talk on modular kits.
The first question to ask was metrics, determining the size of the footprint: should the player be able to jump/climb over a "block" if not, what movements would allow a player to do so? How should it look to the player when they are inside a "block." We discussed quite a bit what a modular block meant spacially to a player, and experimented with many variations, ultimately our footprint settled to 450cm x 450cm x 450cm. Which was a height the player could just barely not scale over without supporting platforms. I took special consideration into the cargo container, since that was the main piece and that had to work with the modular kit but also look distinct and convincingly like a cargo container, so the cargo container ended up becoming its own modular block with dimensions of 450 cm x 450 cm x 1050 cm, which was about 2 and one-third a footprint.
The wooden planks and shanty wall pieces were far more modular, and as a result I created pieces for them that were smaller than the footprint, which were used to make the "playgrounds" feel more organic and integrated with the world.
The goal of the hero was to provide an objective for the player to reach at the end. It acts as a monument that anchors the player. The player can first see it when crossing the bridge into the island at the start, and it appears dead-on as they cross over the platforming segment to the final island section.
Critical Path