Talon is a platformer game about a young video game character, Talon, who dies trying to save his princes. Upon his death, he finds himself in a strange land where all the inhabitants look like him. It seems the afterlife is filled with all the lives that came before his. Talon rallies his fellow… Talons… in a bid to break the cycle and return to complete his quest.

Talon was created for a course at the Centre for Digital Media; The Visual Story. The assignment required that we create a piece of interactive media that told a story of transition and change. This theme of transition is embodied in Talon in two ways; Talon’s death and resurrection and Talon’s discovery of his existence as a controlled character.

The game itself transitions from Talon’s world, a 2d side-scrolling experience, to the underworld’s 3d cavern. Talon was created in Unity with models and animations created in Maya.

Level Designer and Modeler
For this project I was tasked with the creation and design of the underworld’s 3d space. This also involved the texturing of the landscape as well as placement and generation of doodads and NPCs.

Going into this project my experience with maya was limited to simple character animations and building design. Landscape had turned out to be a very different beast altogether. Several times during the modeling process I had to rethink my approach as I had to balance the desired look of the landscape and polygon complexity limitations within Unity.

If I were to tackle landscape modeling again for a project such as this, I will definitely be taking a simpler approach. I often found myself focusing on the small details of the landscape design resulting in scaling issues which required me to fine tune more than necessary.