Role: Character & Environment Artist, Game Designer
Year: 2020
Tools Used: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Autodesk Maya, Unity and Substance Painter
Year: 2020
Tools Used: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Autodesk Maya, Unity and Substance Painter
FILTERS: The Chaotic Nature of Falling in Love
Game Screenshot
Game Screenshot
Game Screenshot
Concept
This project explores the intense emotional complexity of falling in love; not as a soft, romantic fantasy, but as a chaotic, overwhelming, and vulnerable transformation. I designed an interactive environmental walking simulator in Unity to immerse players in an emotional journey through a surreal, emotional landscape representing innocence, anxiety, and acceptance.
Game Screenshot: The start of something new - Innocence
Game Screenshot: Visual representation of Acceptance and Grief
Poster Promotion
Key Gameplay Features
▸Players collect significant lore items scattered throughout each environment, each revealing fragments of the deeper narrative.
▸Gathering three key items triggers a transition to the next environment, marking progression through the game’s emotional journey.
▸The final environment symbolizes the player’s movement into a state of deep grief and acceptance, closing the narrative arc with powerful thematic resonance.
Playthrough
Main Menu in-game
Tools & Creative Process
▸Concept Art (Adobe Photoshop): Designed characters and environments based on emotional stages; soft lines and muted palettes for innocence, sharp angles and high contrast for anxiety and anger
▸3D Modeling (Maya and Substance Painter): Built a fragmented, modern-urban architectural structure symbolizing non-traditional values and emotional disorientation
▸Game Development (Unity): Developed a first-person walking simulator to let the player explore the emotional architecture, triggering mood shifts through lighting, space, and pacing
Environment Concept Art
Representation of Anxiety
Concept Art - The City
Created in Adobe Photoshop, inspired by Kowloon Walled City
The final concept art for Filters served as the emotional and visual foundation of the game. It portrays a densely layered, claustrophobic cityscape inspired by Kowloon Walled City; symbolizing the overwhelming and chaotic mental state of falling in love.
The visual tone blends urban decay with soft lighting and fragmented architecture, reflecting the emotional contrast between vulnerability and pressure, beauty and instability. Narrow corridors, harsh structural lines, and muted color palettes echo themes of anxiety, confusion, and emotional fragmentation, while subtle, gentle highlights offer moments of tenderness and clarity.
This concept piece was key in guiding:
▸The environmental layout in Unity
▸The emotional pacing of the player's journey
▸The use of architecture as metaphor for internal states.
The aesthetic walks the line between grounded urban realism and psychological surrealism; establishing a space where emotional storytelling can unfold without a single word.
Tools: Autodesk Maya for 3D modeling
Tools: Substance Painter to add rotten and worn approach + graffiti
This 3D environment, sculpted in Maya, brings the final concept art of Filters to life by transforming emotional atmosphere into physical space. The design draws from the visual chaos and density of Kowloon Walled City, translating its overwhelming structure into a metaphor for emotional intensity.
▸The space is built to feel dark, worn out, and emotionally heavy:
▸Surfaces are aged, with textures that evoke decay, rot, and emotional erosion
▸Graffiti, trash piles, and crumbling walls speak to feelings of abandonment, conflict, and emotional noise
▸The layout is tight and maze-like, simulating the disorientation of love’s more anxious or destabilizing moments
▸Lighting was used intentionally to isolate areas of emotional focus; casting certain paths in deep shadow, while allowing faint light to break through in others, representing fleeting clarity or acceptance.
This space doesn’t just support gameplay; it tells the story. Every broken wall, stained surface, or buried corner holds emotional weight. It invites the player to walk through their own discomfort; to explore what love feels like when it’s not clean, perfect, or gentle.
Screenshots
Screenshots
Screenshots
Environment Concept Art
Representation of Grief and Acceptance
Concept Art - The Park
Created in Adobe Photoshop
This concept art marks the emotional resolution of Filters, transitioning from dark, enclosed spaces into an open field of vivid green grass beneath a wide blue sky. It visually and emotionally represents the final stage of the journey: grief transformed into acceptance.
▸The blue sky symbolizes emotional clarity. An openness that comes after the storm, where grief is no longer resisted but quietly held
▸The green grass reflects renewal and life continuing, even after pain; soft, gentle, and alive, in contrast to the hardness of earlier spaces
▸The presence of wind is subtle but significant: it represents movement, letting go, and the invisible passing of emotion; something you feel but cannot hold
▸The vastness of the space allows the player (and the self) to breathe again. No longer confined, but allowed to exist within stillness and softness
Together, these elements express the emotional state of grief not as suffering, but as a necessary and human process; one that leads to acceptance, peace, and emotional spaciousness.
This environment was originally designed to represent grief and acceptance; an open, blue-toned space filled with light and gentle movement. However, as the emotional narrative of Filters developed, the meaning of this environment transformed into something deeper and more unsettling: the emotional state of being stuck in unresolved grief, and the quiet hopelessness of emotional numbness.
What if grief lingers so long it becomes your atmosphere? This space reflects the beauty and burden of emotional stillness.
▸The world appears to be underwater, with bubbles suspended in the sky; creating a surreal, dream-like space that blurs reality and memory
▸A single, pulsing light shines in the distance, moving like a heartbeat or perhaps a reminder, just out of reach
▸The palette is entirely blue, reinforcing feelings of emotional submersion and detachment
Though vast, the space feels isolated; soft, but suffocating; open, but unchanging
The environment holds an emotional contradiction: what was once meant to represent healing now mirrors the weight of grief that refuses to pass, where acceptance becomes a kind of emotional stillness. Peaceful on the surface, but paralyzing underneath.
Early Ideas from Development Phase
Character Design - Trevor Lam
These early character designs explored the emotional identity of the player-avatar in Filters. Ultimately, I chose to remove the character to keep the experience more abstract and internal, allowing the environment to speak for the emotional state instead.
Reflection & Grow
FILTERS became a foundational piece in my creative journey, showing me that my strength lies in emotionally charged visual storytelling, and that interactive design can be a deeply personal form of communication. This project taught me how to translate emotion into environment, and how game design can be a powerful medium for internal storytelling. If I revisited this project, I would integrate subtle animations and sound to deepen the sensory impact.
