(Environment) My work on "The Way of Kings: Escape the Shattered Plains"

Joseph Silverman

Hey polycount! I haven't posted in a long time. Im updating my portfolio on Artstation because I'm starting to look for work, and wanted to share a little bit  from my recent projects. Here's a selection of work I did for Escape the Shattered Plains, a desktop VR game that came out about a year ago.

Was part of a really small team + some outsourcers -- I made all of the solo assets shown, did most of the lighting/polish/dressing of the environment, made the ground, did some misc shader work, and lots more.
Notably the actual chasm walls are not my work at all (aside for the orange moss shader, wetness maps, and some tweaks for cohesiveness)







There's a bunch more on my artstation if you're interested! This project is long done and had some weird constraints (performancewise, since it's a VR game started in 2016, and also on my time since I filled a lot of misc roles on the project and we were stretched pretty thin) but feedback or critiques are still appreciated!

Hypnocube

Really cool work! If you had more time it would have been neat to add a bit more debris in the chasm, like the broken bridge. Discarded weapons, dead Parshendi or Alethi. Maybe some deep gouges in the stone from chasm fiends. Otherwise the only thing that stands out to me is the more tan/dry stones don't match up with the darker wetter chasm walls. Makes em stick out, but that contrast could be what your going for.

Joseph Silverman

Thanks Hynocube! Yeah, more fleshed out bits of storytelling would have gone a long way in the environment, I agree. Those ideas were all things we wanted to do better at (and are all present in limited, not really impactful ways) but didn't end up working out.

Our original plan was for larger rock props to be more unified with the chasm, but it ended up being acceptable and better for gameplay (they're interactable) for them to stay distinct.