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.

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.