Survey Island (Riven, 2024)
As one of the first two artists on the Riven remake, I played a pivotal role in establishing the game’s foundational environment art. During the initial phase, I completed a full massing and graybox pass of the entire game, laying the groundwork before the full team was brought on. My early contributions helped define the scale, structure, and visual language of Riven’s environments, ensuring they translated seamlessly into VR while remaining faithful to the original game.
For Survey Island, I was responsible for shaping most of the exterior landscapes, focusing on plausible scale, composition, and navigability. Certain areas required design refinements to enhance gameplay readability and VR immersion, while preserving the island’s iconic atmosphere. While many of the final assets were handed off for polish, my work strongly influenced the overall look and feel of the island.
Key Contributions:
Upper Lake Area: Designed and fully authored the floating walkway, from initial concept to final in-game asset. This included modeling, baking, texturing, and material work, utilizing layered material tools for realistic surface blending. The walkway was later repurposed for the Overlook Area, where I also integrated the iconic dagger structure into the environment, ensuring a photorealistic and grounded appearance.
Overlook Puzzle Box: Developed the puzzle box located in the overlook area. While late-stage design adjustments were made for puzzle clarity, my original work helped establish its structural design and functionality.
Maglev Dock Area: Created the Maglev Dock, ensuring it was visually and structurally consistent with the other island docking stations while being uniquely embedded within a cave environment.
Technical Contributions: In addition to asset creation, I contributed to collision setup, lighting optimization, bug fixes, and polishing other artists' work to ensure seamless integration within Unreal Engine.
My work on Survey Island helped shape one of Riven’s most recognizable locations, ensuring it was both faithful to the original game and optimized for modern gameplay experiences, including VR.
Survey Island Plateau. I handled most of the massing and graybox in this region. For final art I did the Dagger Overlook at the top of the cliff.
Large dagger in Cliff.
I modeled, textured, and did the material pass on this iconic piece.
Giant Dagger Overlook, both sides.
I handled the Large Dagger Update, and the Control Box re design.
Overlook Bridge
Overlook Puzzle Box
Upper Lake birds eye. Another area where I did most of the massing and graybox.
Upper Lake walkway. I designed pieces to be modular, and had a special blue print that we used to place the walkways, which would place each piece appropriately, and also when appropriate add random effects like UV placement and per plank coloration.
Broken Dock Section. You get a better view at some of the walkway pieces. You also get a better sense of the material I work I did on the walkway, as well as the pond scum layers I put at the water line.
Survey Maglev Dock approach.
Maglev Dock interior.
A key problem I needed to solve with our materials was to have tiling surface textures, but to make them not look tiling. I was able accomplish this with our in house material tools.