Under Jugger Hollow
Subterranean Studios
Lighting Artist & Level Designer, March 2024 - April 2024
Team size of 9 people
Under Jugger Hollow is a Unity Engine game about a boy named Steven who fell beneath Jugger Hollow. The elevator back up to the surface is broken; he's now trapped under Jugger Hollow. He must now escape by solving puzzles and catching Aidan, one of the last remaining residents of this cursed place.
The project was completed over a 5 week timeframe with a 9 member team.
An image of the electric level, with the top right displaying the area before a lighting pass.
An image of the electric level, with the top right displaying the area before a lighting pass.
Level Design
Images in the top right are before post processing and lighting. This scene also uses emissive materials extensively, as well as 11 total point lights. The bloom is tinted green, and then the colors are rebalanced in color grading to an orange/yellow tone. This better reflects a gloomy feel while still maintaining the orange hue of the scene. Volumetric fog was also used extensively here to set the tone of the scene, as it enhanced the factory feeling that I was looking to implement.
Images of the hub area, which leads to the three levels (top row), and the electric level (bottom)
Lighting
This is the electric level, which demonstrates the design philosophy behind the game. The levels overall were quite small, but with a large, ominous area in the middle containing a puzzle. The player would walk up to the area and have to solve these puzzles in order to progress. As such, the level design is centered around bringing as much attention to the puzzle areas as possible, leading to designs like this, which have a small hallway leading to the puzzle in the middle of the level.
Project Takeaways
This was a project where I expanded my knowledge of realtime lighting to further enhance gameplay and visuals. This was my first attempt at using only realtime light sources to light a scene. I wanted to learn proper optimization of realtime scenes with improved visuals. I utilized Unity’s HDRP pipeline to implement fog and post processing effects. This project was also heavily under time constraints, as I only had around 5 weeks to complete it. Overall, it turned out well, and I learned immensely due to the constraints of the project.