Colony is an AI-driven survival simulation game set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where players manage autonomous AI avatars that learn, make independent decisions, and develop unique personalities. As the sole environment artist and lighting lead on the project, I was responsible for all world building, biome design, material pipeline, and visual quality across the full game environment — all within the significant constraints of high-end mobile performance.

I designed and built all environments across Colony's world — from initial blockout through final lighting and polish. The visual target was AAA quality on mobile, which required every decision to be justified both artistically and technically. Dynamic shadows, sci-fi material variety, building upgrade states, and atmospheric effects all had to coexist within a tight performance budget.

The first version of Colony was built around a full procedural content generation system designed in Unreal Engine 5. The system was capable of generating entire playable colonies in a single pass — placing buildings, infrastructure, connecting lanes, and populating environments automatically. A suite of companion tools allowed designers to then iterate rapidly: adding zones, editing layouts, connecting buildings with paths, placing doors and entry points, and scaling content without manual rebuilding.

The system was designed from the ground up for speed of iteration and production scalability — critical for a game where world composition needed to respond to design changes continuously throughout development.

To achieve strong visual quality within mobile memory and GPU constraints, I designed a custom material pipeline built around vertex colour material IDs and packed mask textures. Vertex colour channels define distinct material zones on each mesh, while a single packed texture carries baked detail data — dirt, wear and tear, curvature, and ambient occlusion — that the shader reads per zone. Additional parameters expose per-material albedo, roughness, and metalness for further art direction control.

The result was a system that delivered high visual variation from a very small texture memory footprint. Critically, all environment props were set up to render as 1 asset = 1 draw call through instancing and material batching — enabling the dense, varied world Colony required while keeping GPU overhead tightly controlled.

One of Colony's most distinctive features is a building in the game world that allows players to generate custom 3D assets from text prompts — and then equip them directly as part of the gameplay loop. Powered by Atlas, this system produces textured 3D meshes in the cloud and imports them into the game at runtime, seamlessly integrating with the player's character. Currently live with helmets, with weapons, shields, and companions planned for future updates.

Achieving this in a mobile game required close collaboration across art, engineering, and the Atlas team to define performance thresholds, LOD targets, and seamless integration with Colony's existing asset and material pipeline.