Star Wars: Smugglers Gambit is a new UEFN/Fortnite Island developed internally by Disney Games and Digital Entertainment - play it with Island Code 7474-2686-2725. This experience takes place over multiple locations on a new Star Wars planet Ord Ryla. This collection focuses on my work for the newly released 'Poisoned River' mission - where you uncover and dismantle a secret Imperial Facility that's poisoning the planet's water supply.
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This was a super fun space to work on as I got to have a lot of creative ownership and freedom again. From the high-level brief and references we got from our Lead Designer, I was free to explore the visuals of the space without the aid of concept art, on top of doing the initial level design layout, as our Lead Level Designer, Jed Bellini, was busy with standing up scripting across multiple post-launch missions. After syncing together on my super rough top-down layout and scouting a location together, I went off and built the initial level design layout in a hidden portion of our existing Imperial Research POI. Jed ended up being happy with my layout and he did a rough cover pass, and I took it from there to theme his cover pass to the space and bring the rest of the space to final. It was a relatively quick production of just a few weeks. Art-wise, my visual goals were to make this hidden portion of the base feel a lot more industrial and structural compared to the rest of the base, while also introducing some natural elements to tie in the fact that they were poisoning the planet's water supply. Was super fun to explore the art for the space!
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Our memory budget was fairly tight, so I had to find clever ways of re-using existing assets and kits from the rest of the Imperial Research POI (which Brian initially did a great job on, and was fun to riff off of his art pass). The one new piece of art I could add to give the space a bit more flavor is the poison scum that was on the surface of the water - created the texture and custom Transparent Water Material with distortion controls to achieve the look. Given the short timeline of creating this event and space after launch, I had to iterate quickly, get new versions in front of the team often, to land on the final look we shipped with. Through riffing with my lead, Martin, and my Art Director, Ken Morse, and the rest of the team, ended up landing this fun hidden space within our existing POI! In the end, I did the initial level design pass, all the visual ideation for the space, did worldbuilding with all our existing assets, lit the environment, came up with custom Shader logic for the poison water scum, iterated based on weekly playtests, did a clean clipping pass for navmesh and smooth player navigation and did all the final bug fixing and polish.
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Original rock kit (I just did some material re-skinning tweaks) & some final lighting tweaks by Martin Teichmann. Original bush kit by me. Everything else is re-used assets from the Star Wars kit provided in UEFN/Fortnite.
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Art Director:
Ken Morse
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Lead Environment Artist:
https://www.artstation.com/mayday
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Environment Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/brianbeppu
https://www.artstation.com/mollywarner
https://www.artstation.com/invader-roxas
https://www.artstation.com/jobyek
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Environment Concept Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/walkingjayart
https://www.artstation.com/kellyperry
https://www.artstation.com/jenmeiart
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Level Designers:
Jed Bellini
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FX Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/justinwoodard
https://www.artstation.com/nfaithhui
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Lead Character Artist & Character/Vehicle Outsource Management:
https://www.artstation.com/hcldesignworks
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Lead Sound Designer:
Doug Prior
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