Posted December 03, 2025 by AlejandroBD
Lighting
Lighting Design
In designing the lighting for my sci-fi stealth game, I focused on clarity, mood, and performance. I used a point light to highlight the key, grabbing the player’s attention to this important item. It is the item needed to escape from the military sci-fi base. Red emissive ceiling lights and blue-toned sci-fi textures established a futuristic atmosphere. The red emissive ceiling lights create an urgent and dangerous mood as the balancing blue tones evoke tension and stealth. Additionally, the red ceiling lights were strategically placed in the scene to aid the player unconsciously for gameplay readability. They are always in one direction, guiding you to another room or hallway.
Lighting Implementation
The lighting in my level maintains good performance levels across almost the entire map. The rooms and hallways are covered in either dark blue or light blue under the optimization view mode light complexity section, indicating that performance does not drop. One problem players had was that the doors/exits were hardly visible in the level. I carved the doorways of all the doors in my level and replaced the materials with another sci-fi emissive material. This greatly improved the level’s readability for players. There are no major artifacts, as the emissive lighting from the ceilings and sci-fi textures have been adjusted with post-processing volumes.
Materials
Material Design For the material design in my sci-fi stealth game, I focused on creating an advanced technological society aesthetic. However, not too overly futuristic with flying or automated advanced technology. I chose wall textures that look high-tech with emissive materials to reinforce that military base with advanced technology. I also used hex-shaped textures for the floors and doorways to contrast the existing high-tech walls. They maintain the sci-fi feel of the level while providing more clarity to the player by knowing they are looking at a floor or doorway.
Material Implementation
Small chairs and large military creatures are scaled intentionally to feel believable in the level. The materials are also scaled correctly onto the props, making sure they do not stretch or squeeze. The high-tech wall materials are consistent throughout the entire level, resulting in an immersive environment that supports the narrative and gameplay.
Audio
Audio Design
For audio design, I created a consistent and looped sci-fi soundscape that reinforces the atmosphere of a highly advanced tech military base. A looping hum sound sets the futuristic LED tone of the game. It’s low-pitched, making it sound more intimidating to the player. There is also a loop of beeps and boops that amplifies that advanced technological feeling. Combined with the red LED ceiling lights, it can help evoke a strong presence of surveillance. This audio forces players to play more stealthily because they have no idea what might happen if they are seen by an enemy.
Audio Implementation
Both these sounds trigger right when the player spawns, plunging them into an alert and cautious mood. In the beginning, the sound for the beeps and boops was extremely high and completely masked the hum background sound. I adjusted the beeps and boops audio output to 0.03 and the hum sound to 0.7. Since the hum sound is more low-pitched, I didn’t have to tone it down as much compared to the beeps and boops. The player did not notice that it was two different sounds playing together, meaning that they were not competing against each other.
VFX
VFX Design
For the portal VFX, I created a visually dominant effect that communicates its purpose clearly without interfering with gameplay or flat-out telling the player what it is. In the beginning, I created a hole in the wall that the player could walk through to enter the room next door without sneaking past the guard. This broke the sci-fi futuristic feel of the game, so I decided to create a portal instead. The portal has a thin pink border that rapidly transitions to white, and finally to blue in the middle. The blue color in the middle is concaved towards the wall, which hints that the location will be where the portal points to. I used a brighter version of pink and blue as analogous colors because they match the sci-fi aesthetic of the level and materials of other props such as blue LEDs.
VFX Implementation
The VFX portal in my game is visually consistent and optimized for performance. Firstly, the particles are not overwhelming and do not scatter everywhere. These particles stay close together to prevent any forms of distraction to the player. The portal’s shape and sprite scaling make it recognizable without being overly distracting. I ended up adjusting the Niagara particle spawn rate from the default 150,000 to 50,000 after testing. This balanced the visual quality of the portal so that it didn’t look flimsy while maintaining performance. Another performance implementation I did was changing the simulation target to GPU got better runtime performance. This VFX integrates seamlessly into the sci-fi environment and supports the teleporting function without breaking immersion.
Post-Processing
Post-Processing Design
For post-processing, I focused on enhancing the sci-fi futuristic tone of the level while maintaining clarity and immersion. I lowered the color grading temperature from 6500 to 4000 to shift the environment from warm and cozy to cold and futuristic. Any further, and the blue LED materials would overpower the lighting of the red ceiling walls and blind the player in-game. I added a red bloom tint to bring life to the flat ceiling lights, which reinforces the sense of urgency and alertness. Then I added a subtle blue tint that boosted the sci-fi materials, making it sharper and brighter without clashing with the red ceiling light bloom. This created a balanced and cohesive palette of reds and blues that gave players an urgency but stealthy feeling while playing. For crouching, I implemented a vignette effect that smoothly fades black in and out using a timeline. This vignette effect helps the player feel hidden, further pushing the stealth immersion of the game.
Post-Processing Implementation
All the post-processing effects are tuned to support the sci-fi futuristic aesthetic of the game without breaking gameplay immersion. There’s no overexposure, excessive blur, lens flare, or distracting filter. I deliberately avoided lens flare and blur, as they felt unrealistic and broke the HD clarity I wanted for a futuristic feel. Lens flare was one of the effects I played with to try and boost the LED effect. However, it was blinding the player, highly distracting and broke the sci-fi immersive feel.
UI
UI Design
For UI design, I created a sci-fi glitch aesthetic for the pause and main menu. The layout is clean and centered for both the pause and main menu, with button labels that reflect the function they are meant to do. For typography, I used a readable, stylized futuristic font to fit the game’s overall sci-fi tone and feel. The color palette I used was an analogous one with cool blues and greens with subtle glow effects to reinforce the high-tech sci-fi atmosphere in my level. The blue menus are visually integrated with the background environments of the blue LED materials in the background environment to avoid breaking immersion.
UI Implementation
The main menu is fully responsive and functional. When hovering over a button in the main menu, a border appears to show that you are hovering over the specific button. The pause menu, although visually laid out, does not have functional buttons currently. The main menu and pause menu are visually integrated in the game’s overall presentation by matching the blue tone sci-fi color palette, looking like a glitch sci-fi effect, and as well as having a futuristic font.
Polish and Presentation
Bugs & Polish
Overall, the game runs smoothly with no major bugs that crash the game. When the player dies, they respawn; when the player grabs the key, they are able to unlock the door; the teleporters work; pressing 1 to become invisible for a moment works; the main menu works; BP_EnemyAI’s blueprints are fully functional, and the player can dash/roll, jump, and crouch. Good lighting in my light maps and performance-friendly VFX are good reasons the game runs smoothly.
Personality & Originality
Expression & Personality
My game reflects my unique creative voice through the design choices, tone, and overall execution. I leaned into a distinct sci-fi stealth aesthetic, combining glitch-inspired visual main menus, emissive red lighting for urgency, and cold color grading to make the world feel tense yet immersive. I used sci-fi materials for the walls and props in my level. For example, I changed the mesh of the throwable rock to a small cylindrical capsule to fit the sci-fi theme of the game. This improves the tone and immersion of the game because a rock does not really fit the theme of the game. Another change I made was changing the wooden chair to the same material as the wall to match the aesthetic of the level. From the glowing VFX portal to the balanced audio mix of engine hums and system beeps, each element helped carry the sci-fi futurism personality of this project by improving the atmosphere, clarity, cohesion, and immersion of the game.
Originality & Risk Taking
Two of the biggest things I did that were not covered in class were creating a keyboard event to turn the player invisible and adding teleportation to the level. Invisibility, by far, gave me one of the most problems and bugs in my game. Before, the player would start the game and the enemy AI would not chase or attack them. They would only chase and attack the player after they turned invisible once. Then the game worked smoothly after that. To fix this, I went to my BP_ThirdPersonCharacterCustom’s blueprints and added a new visibility on Event BeginPlay. This allowed the EnemyAI to see the player and attack them without having to turn invisiblilty on and off to run the game. Initially, I had a hole through the wall that led the player to the room next to them. However, after creating my Niagara VFX that looked like a portal, I decided to use that idea to create a portal that leads to the other side of the room instead of the random hole in the corner of the wall. This definitely made the game feel better as it restored that broken immersion that was lost from the hole in the wall, as this level is sci-fi and futuristic like. There shouldn’t be many holes in walls.