Aura's Legacy

A year-long capstone project for the first year of my Master's, built as a duo with Johann Bois. We had one imposed constraint: a temple the player cannot leave. We turned it into a fairly calm third-person adventure, in the spirit of Journey and Ori. Nature is fading. Aura, the goddess of nature, has sealed her essence into a crystal and shut herself inside her temple to draw on her last strength. The player is Lira, last of the Watchers, guided by a ceremonial knife carrying a fragment of Aura's soul. You have to understand what is going on before you can do anything about it.

I handled the temple gameplay, the shaders and VFX, the level design, and the integration of assets and sound. The three trials are water, wind and light, and each one has its shape: the square for water and memory, the circle for wind and flow, the triangle for light and awakening. Players recognise them before reading a single line. Climbing is the connecting thread: you grab ledges, pull yourself up on rocks and roots, and height structures the exploration. I also built everything that shows the world reacting: particles when you interact, godrays pointing at a point of interest, lights that answer your actions, a camera shake when an object appears, musical notes at every basin, footsteps that change with the surface.

Two shaders carry the art direction. The first is vertex painting: I hand-paint wear, moss and roots so ground, rock and vegetation blend without a visible seam. The second is the RevealSphere, a sphere that unfolds around Lira when she focuses and highlights interactive elements. On performance, we were aiming for 60 FPS under 3 GB and we got there, with progressive per-zone loading (level streaming) and Nanite on dense environments.

The post-mortem was mostly a production lesson. The scope shrank along the way, and dialogues that worked perfectly well in the editor had to be cut from the final build, where they caused a soft lock. Since then we test the build continuously, not just the editor.