Eternal Echoes -- Eliora's Enigma

Eternal Echoes -- Eliroa's enigma part1

A fully immersive VR game that mostly focuses on visual performances and gun shooting. A VR experience that the world had changed dramatically when the Ice Age made a bold comeback. This was the wildness of the future. Amidst this new world, stories emerged of Eliora, a mystery girl who wandered the wild landscapes. No one knew where she had come from, and what was more astonishing was that she appeared not to age. A century seemed like a decade to her. Every tribe and settlement had a story about her. The player will find the world under the mystery of true earth where the dynamic computer operates human beings in a digitally made earth called “Reality”, the player was teleported by Eliora de Guardian to know the truth and to save her from eternal existence as she is made by human and machine with undead organics.

Trailer video

Concept Base

The world had changed dramatically. Great expanses of desert with bleached sand and expansive frozen lands shimmering in silver had replaced cities. Ice Age had made a bold comeback. This was the wildness of the future. Amidst this new world, stories emerged of Eliora, a mystery girl who wandered the wild landscapes. No one knew where she had come from, and what was more astonishing was that she appeared not to age. A century seemed like a decade to her.

The player will act as the main character in the novel - a human explorer being transported to this ice-age earth and discovering the truth that we are currently operated by supercomputers in unhabituated real earth that have turned to Iceland centuries before.

Choosing a futuristic and clean sci-fi colour palette with white and blue for your VR game enhances the thematic depth and visual experience. White symbolizes modernity and sophistication, fitting the sci-fi genre's association with advanced technology and futuristic settings, while also conveying clarity and purity, important for themes like uncovering truths in a technologically complex world.

Blue adds a cool, calming effect, often used in sci-fi to represent technological interfaces, suggesting intelligence and stability. This combination not only supports the narrative’s exploration of deep truths and enduring values but also ensures visual cohesion and immersion. The high contrast between white and blue enhances visibility and focus on gameplay elements without visual clutter, facilitating player navigation and interaction. Additionally, this colour scheme influences the psychological impact on players, promoting a sense of wonder and encouraging exploration, which is critical in maintaining engagement in a VR environment.

Metahuman -- Eliora

In reflecting the main colour panel chosen in the theme of the game, the design of Eliora should also based on white colour in this case she represents the next thousands of years’ earth and her background settings of being the very last human-machine in the world that still has her morality.

“An 18-year-old girl with shoulder-length white hair, wearing a futuristic bodysuit consisting of a carbon fibre inner upper body and a big cloak with three layers of protection. Her body was made in half machine with half carbon-based life form and she is the most successful combination of machine and human brain neural sections.”

The MetaHuman Editor is a sophisticated tool developed by Unreal Engine that allows for the creation of highly realistic human characters for use in digital applications. Users can start with a base model and customize it using various features such as Blend, Sculpt, and Move. The **Blend** feature enables the mixing of different facial features from a diverse library, providing a wide range of anatomical variations. With the **Sculpt** tool, users can make fine adjustments to the mesh, tweaking the minutiae of the facial structure to achieve the desired look. The **Move** tool allows for the repositioning of facial features, enhancing expressiveness and individuality. 

Scene Laboratory

The laboratory is where the game starts, and Eliora will first appear as an introductory to the game and teaches the player how to use the pistol and the teleportation tools.  Players will learn with their virtual hands connected by Oculus controllers in this Lab and have the mission to shoot the enemy as practice. 

Scene Frozen World

In producing an outdoor scene like this with no repetitive texture and blending assets together, there are several methods used to blend the edge of objects by defining a landscape height level and applying landscape texture gradually blending up to whatever the meshes defined belongs to the land. 

Scene Green House

The greenhouse refers to concepts like “the last tree” and “The last glimmer of warmth in Armageddon“ which gives a strong sense of contrast as well as a more impactful sense of immersion, by adding some specific lighting and particle effects in the scene, it makes the whole scene full of wrapped up warmth, similar to the stun effect in the winter's comforter, as well as the soft light effect of the foggy mass particle effects.

Scene Pagoda

The Pagoda scene I have made was initially for one of the signature places around the world, which meant to be a mystery pagoda that belongs to a female, but this woman is the elder Eliora the people believe, she is gogoes, quiet, beautiful guardian of this endless world. The player will find out this (the woman god is Eliora) with several memory clips.

The scene was created with the Quixle bridge asset of snow cliffs and the ruin mesh asset downloaded from the website, the style is based on a cold outdoor environment that has a volumetric fug feature shaping the only warm sunlight in this cold world. The snow follower particle system also provides environmental temperature features.

Scene Database

The last scene with gameplay features will be a data centre with plenty of servers working representing the supercomputer that runs human’s virtual world, in our terms, reality, this is also where Eliora’s office is and where she lives.

The end of the corridor of the last scene was set to be the collection of every element appeared within the game, this is meant to be a “reminder” to players that this game is only built for the “virtual human beings” to experience the real world in responding to the background setting and makes players to think of the popular question appeared recently “are we currently all live in a virtual world?”

Scene ELiora's inner world

This scene represents the inner world of Eliora that she was chosen to become the last human being around the earth, and her memories have to be taken to make her more emotionally stable to be the guardian, she has to be calm in emergency; easy to be controlled in mind; and always remember her mission at any time. She has to be a machine-like human to achieve these, but some of the enthusiasts were remained in her deep heart, for example the scene shown refers to her favorite song – Clare de Lune played by piano.

The scene is set to be endless in view which indicates the inner world, and the particle system consists of white flares and flying butterflies are the core of her peaceful mind.

Play Test video

Conclusion

The player will explore the "alien" place with a sci-fi pistol during the whole experience, and the hints will all point to Eliora - the girl who instructed the player the man behind the scenes who teleported you to this unknown world intentionally to unravel the truth of "reality". She is the last human-machine creation made by a human professor. She must guard the frozen earth in her reality where she operates the supercomputers that maintain human virtual lives from the harsh natural environment. For thousands of years, she spent her endless life on her own, lonely, silently. She could no longer endure this constant pain, so she decided to summon the player to destroy everything she was protecting so that she could return to peace.

This is a sad story in that the player should act as the main character and experience all the stories between the true frozen earth in 2447 and the guardian Eliora.