Charon’s Companion
High Concept
Charon’s Companion is a 3D adventure platformer where you play as Nyx, a cat navigating the underworld to save your late owner, Chrys. After her soul shatters in the wake of a tragic accident, Charon, the ferryman of the afterlife, asks for your help in piecing it back together.
I was the art lead on this game, and worked on Character Modeling, VFX, Environmental Modeling, and Lighting.
Check out our itch page for the game!
Process
Concept Art
As the vision holder of the game, once we had decided to go with this idea, I started making some quick concept art pieces to get the general style and feel of the game. These pieces were mostly to understand the vibe of our game and start getting ideas on how to implement it.
The overall theme for this game is heavily inspired from Greek mythology, and traveling into the Underworld. So the overall tone of the game had to be dark and eerie, but not frightening. These original concepts gave us something to iterate on as we progressed through development.
Modeling
I modeled a simple low poly cat, rigged it, and animated all the animations for it in Blender. We used Unreal for the game, so transferring all the correct modeling and animation data over from Blender turned out to be difficult at times, but we were able to get everything in.
Environmental Design
As the art lead for the project, I helped brainstorm puzzle ideas and the environmental impact that areas should have on the player. Our level designer and I would come up with puzzle ideas and I would be in charge of laying everything out to match our aesthetic. Although I didn’t make all the assets for the game, we used what we could to make sure everything fit the game’s style.
We teamed up quite often to make sure the style matched our environment, and the gameplay felt smooth to the player.
Credits
- Kevin McNulty – Producer
- JiaXu (Josh) Chen – Assistant Producer, Narrative Lead, Level Designer
- Kevin Xiao – Tech Lead
- Zejun Meng – Level Designer
- Maya McDaniel – Art Lead
- Victoria Lau – Artist
- Lantian Xu – Artist
- Jung Choi (Aguaral) – Composer