Arches

This western area serves as part of the battlefield area which makes up the first main objective of the game. The three battlefield areas are meant to tell a story, with the almost completely destroyed asteroid field and the blast radius that separates it from the arches. To feed into this story, I made sure that the arches closest to the blast radius were destroyed or distorted in some way, and the whole area was defined by its large, intact structures. I also advocated for moving the rock shrine, one of the larger islands in the game, to the arches area both because it would make sense, and because the shrine's similarity to the battlefield's main objective may cause confusion among players, which would be resolved by moving the former away from the latter.

Dash Shrine

The main piece of side content I made for Solanis was the dash shrine. Located in the northern canyon, the dash shrine's objective is to dash through a set of targets within a time limit. The functionality of the targets and the timer was handled entirely by me, after which I had help hooking them up to the existing shrine and UI systems. Early on, I was brainstorming with the team that this system could be used for a puzzle where the player matches the colors of the target to some kind of statue, but we decided that a shrine that only focused on movement would be a good contrast with the other shrines.

Cut Content

Some of the content I worked on for this project unfortunately ended up being cut for scope, but I still want to discus what it was and my thought process behind it. My first task with side content was blocking out parts of the map for an objective that we called "wind trials". These were intended to be the way the player unlocked segments of the large wind tunnel that surrounds the map, but they were ultimately too time consuming to implement during the time we had.