A collaborative single-player VR hiking game that uses body movement to create a calm and relaxing journey.
Ascent
Our project is a VR experience built in Unreal Engine 5 with foot-tracking technology, designed to create a meditative, low-pressure, immersive environment. Using a mid-poly art style, we focus on gentle exploration and calming natural spaces that allow players to unwind and momentarily escape their busy lives. Our target audience includes people who enjoy meditative VR experiences, adults seeking a brief nature break, and users who prefer soothing, easy-to-navigate VR over action-oriented gameplay.
Visual Effects — Water
Created using Unreal Engine’s material graph, the water features stylized contact waves where it touches the shoreline geometry, light refraction in the shallow areas, and more pronounced wave details in the deeper regions, all built into a single layer water material.
The waterfall is composed of three parts: the main fall, the splash effects, and the waves at the base. To optimize performance, both the main fall and the base waves were created using Unreal Engine’s material graph, while the splash effects were built with a Niagara system. To better match the overall artistic style, the main waterfall uses masks to obscure large areas of foam and flow lines, preserving only the highlights along the model’s key directional changes.
In addition, because the waterfall’s flow is more turbulent, the contact waves where the main waterfall material meets the shoreline geometry are denser in color and use finer noise compared to those in the lake.
