Barren

Barren is a 3rd person open-world exploration game.

Traverse an alien desert planet where you play as a rising star, literally. The star shining on the planet is dying and you are to replace it.
Exploration is done through physics-based movement. You play as a sphere that can either gain extreme down momentum (gravity) or bounce. Use this to quickly travel over great distances, solve platforming challenges and ultimately become the new star.

The prototype is available on itch

Done using Unity and C#

V1

This game started as a semester project for a games development course. We, a team of four + someone from an art course, had to make a concept pitch, paper prototype and design document. The project was then released on itch.
I wanted to explore a 3D game as previously we had only dabbled in 2D games. We knew the idea and concept had to be kept simple in order to have a good final product. This is when we opted for a movement-based exploration game in a big open zone. I came up with the idea and some concept art and we started prototyping. The main mechanics were simple to implement, I spent a lot of time polishing them to feel the best possible and then the team worked on closed challenge levels that would be scattered along the world.

V2

The game was a huge success with our classmates and professors. It looked stunning for such a quickly built and amateur dev team; the idea was also very compelling and unique. It needed a lot of polishing and refinement tho.
Most of the team decided to keep working on the game and was even authorized to be overseen by a professor to get credits for our master’s degree.

Everything was documented and the whole game was revamped. After working many hours on it, remaking the camera system, improving the controls, changing the map and challenges, making shaders from scratch and improving the visuals in general we finished a working prototype, playable from start to finish in about 2-4 hours.

Here is a full showcase of everything created for this prototype, start to finish:

V3

We have continued to work on the project on and off and are planning to polish and release it.
There are still a lot of bugs to fix and mechanics to tune up. Some visuals and the map have already been overhauled too.