Game Summary

Moonsighted is a PC third-person hack-and-slash adventure about cultural and political strife in the face of technology and progress amongst moon-worshipping moths trapped in a cavern. Play as Mairu, a moth miner using the power of cave crystals to empower himself and lift his people out of the depths of the earth.

Explore the dangerous depths of your underground home, fighting off cavernous critters to acquire more crystals and help lead your people back to the moonlight! This game portrays a fictional setting that depicts the dangers of unregulated and thoughtless progress of technology, where the player is put in the shoes of an unreliable narrator.

About the Project

I worked on this game in 2021 as part of my senior capstone project at WPI, in a team of four that included Dylan Valev, Jasmine Duerk, Kaamil Lokhandwala and myself. The project ran only fourteen weeks total: for the first seven we were working alongside our other coursework and focused on preproduction and concept design, and for the latter seven we were full-focused time on production, building out the entire game from scratch. Following the completion of the game, we wrote a research paper showcasing our methodology for designing, developing, and playtesting the game, which you can read here.

In 2022, we showcased Moonsighted at PAX East in Boston as part of the WPI expo booth. We were also recipients of the Provost’s MQP Award of the WPI Interactive Media & Game Development department for our work on the project.

My Responsibilities

I was the principal artist on the team, and was responsible for concept art, character art & animation, environment art, lighting, and level design, with Jasmine Duerk producing additional concept art and environmental models.

Characters

The design of the moth characters was based on real-world luna moths, reinforcing the moon theme. There are two alternative colors for the moth’s textures, one for regular moths and one for those that have activated their “moonsighted” powers. For the art pipeline, I made the base model in Blender, which I was starting to learn at the time, imported to ZBrush to sculpt the hipoly model, then brought it to Maya for retopology & UVs as I was more used to those tools. I made both texture sets in Substance Painter. Mixamo was used for rigging & animation in order to save time in our short production schedule, but I did correct skinning issues in Maya before importing to Unity.