Narrative & Level Design

Samira Come Home is a short narrative experience about leaving the place you grew up in to try to become your own person. In it, you play as a young character with a broken mask, exploring the gated garden of a religious building.

From the very start of the game, the intent is to guide the player via compositition and eyelines. Here, the first lamp is the only bright yellow light in a darker purple environment, and is placed in the middle quadrant of the screen, framed by the biggest central door arch. It tells the player immediately to "go interact with that object over there" (See left image below).

Going to this first light reveals the next one in the player's line of sight immediately (See right image above), and so on.

This second lantern brings to the first environmental narrative beat after the start of the scene, the locked gate - you are trapped (below, left).

From there, the light at the gazebo leads the eye towards the next landmark point. (Above, right).

The footpath and the lanterns guide the rising composition towards a vantage point to overlook the garden from. (See images below).

Finally, you reach the last lantern behind the lighthouse, seemingly hidden but for the watchful eye of the minaret which creeps above you in the frame.

At this point, if you have burned most (or all) of the letters you've found in the lanterns, the game's music should be playing at its loudest. Otherwise, if you've let them all be, this moment is silent.

VFX & Shaders

The firefly effect (top left) around each lantern were custom created using Unity's particle system (bottom left), in order to further draw the player's eye to the lights thanks to the added movement.

The water (top middle) was a great learning experience for me to deepen my understanding of Unity's Shadergraph (bottom right), and was also custom made by me for this project. I wanted it to look, deep, dark, and beautiful, reflecting the environment and enhancing the slightly magical edge to the dreamlike world of Samira.

Finally, I also coded the dithered and posterized shader which gives the whole game this stark, dark, graphical style. From the get-go, I was looking for a rendering/post-processing pipeline which would visually distinguish the environment from the default Unity shaded look, and posterizing has long been one of my favorite filter styles for digital images (see also my work in python image processing).

Character Modeling & Animation

The player character is a mid/low-poly (<5k) human in loose clothing which is inspired by Moroccan short-sleeved jabadors.

They were modeled using Maya and Zbrush, and textured using Adobe Substance Painter, Blender, and Krita.

Below are some custom animations I made for the game using Blender (in order : Idle, Sitting Idle, Walk, Standing Up).

Additional Assets by : Iwo Kmiecik (soundtrack & timeline production), Shey Bala (some gravestone models).