Row’s Observatory

Row’s Observatory and Cartography Studio is a themed game environment inspired by artwork by Keira Santoso. Row is an astronomer living in a distant galaxy. He studies the stars and charts a route for a secret voyage.

I designed the studio as a narrative hub that the player revisits throughout the game. In a nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness story, this one space can reveal the backstory, introduce the game’s mechanics, set out each objective, and give the player a steady place to pause and to return to past events, all through its objects and the way they change.

The question behind the project is how narrative design and environment art can work together, so that one room does the work of many. Planning the story and the assets together lets a single space say more, and saves building scenes that only get used once.

1

room, revisited all game long

5

story jobs the room has to do

1

beam of light to lead the eye

3D

Unreal Engine 5

Row is a character I keep writing. Across my stories he is a soldier drifting home, a boy carrying his mother’s painting, a child not yet born. He keeps the same name and very little else: someone who notices too much, and who waits for things that may not come.

In my short story The Obituary of the Stars, Row is an astronomer with no sky left to study, writing goodbyes for dying stars. This studio is where that Row lives and works. Charts cover the walls, pages lift off the desk, and at the center of the room a globe glows like a small star he is still trying to keep.

Read The Obituary of the Stars →

Before modeling anything, I listed what the room has to do for the story. Then I gave every job to a place, an object or a kind of light, so the player can read it without being told.

The hero asset is the glowing globe on its octagonal map table: the visual center of the room and the object every thread of the story passes through. The key asset is a longcase clock, studied from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clocks in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. One holds the place where Row is going; the other holds time.

Objects that tell

Light does most of the storytelling in this room. I built it in five passes, and each pass answers a story question before it answers a technical one.

29

lights in the scene

2

layers of fog

65

floating pages

110

drifting motes of light

Light plan

Every light in the scene, where it sits and the job it does. There are 29 in total.

Key: main sun
1 directional light

A low golden sun, about 18° above the horizon, aimed through a single east window so it lands on the globe and the map table. It is the only key light in the room: one focal point, and the first thing the player is led to.

Second sun
1 directional light

A faint cyan sun from the opposite side, with no shadows. Two suns in one sky said “another world” in the first pass; in the final pass I switched it off so the beam would stay the only key.

Sky light
1

Fills the whole scene, turned down to almost nothing (0.06). Shadows stay deep brown instead of turning grey, so the room reads as dusk, not daytime.

Window fills
3 rect lights

Set in three window openings, warm and dim. They lift the walls just enough to read the arches and bookcases without competing with the beam.

Beam bounce
1 point light

Where the beam hits the table. It fakes the sunlight bouncing back up onto the globe and the nearby faces.

Desk light
1 point light

Beside the candle on Row’s desk. A small warm glow that says someone was working here a moment ago.

Globe halo
2 point lights

One above the globe in warm gold, one below in pale blue. The globe’s own glow is cut from 6 to 0.12, so it feels magical but faint, never a lamp.

Practicals
19 point lights

6 lanterns, the large globe, 4 hanging globes, 6 inside the garden pavilions and 2 by the front door. Small warm pools that walk the eye through the room and out of the door, all dimmed so they support the beam.

Atmosphere
fog and dust

Height fog with volumetric fog, deep blue outside and limited to 11 m so the forest falls away into dark; an amber local fog inside the room; 4 dust emitters along the beam so the light has something to catch. Exposure is set by hand and kept low.

Motion

The floating globes, pages and motes move through their materials rather than through Blueprints. Each object’s position in the world offsets its timing, so no two drift together, and the room keeps breathing even when the player stands still.

Both materials are grouped and annotated below. The same three ideas run through them: a phase taken from world position, a slow sine for light, and a few sines added together for movement.

The room in clay, before any materials or lighting. I used these passes to check silhouettes, proportions and the way light falls across the forms.