Colony R&D documents the technical research and pipeline development that ran alongside environment production. Where the Colony project page presents the visual output, this page covers the systems behind it — procedural generation workflows, modular building frameworks, and Blueprint-based scattering and dressing tools, all built to deliver AAA-quality environments within mobile constraints. As the sole environment artist on the project, building scalable, non-destructive tooling was as critical as the art itself. The work established the procedural foundation for the wider Parallel environment pipeline.

A suite of procedural workflows built in UE5's PCG framework, extended with external tools including Dash. Every system was designed around Colony's specific constraints — mobile performance budgets, runtime randomisation, and large outdoor environments driven by a controlled asset library. The non-destructive approach enabled rapid iteration and prototyping at every stage, from world-scale layout to granular prop dressing.

The videos below document the full pipeline for generating a Colony from scratch. Starting from a single floor tile as the base unit of measurement, additive and subtractive PCG tools assemble complete platform and building layouts procedurally. PCG at this level of precision is demanding — the more variables and dependencies you introduce, the harder it becomes to maintain control while keeping the system flexible. It also proves exceptional during blockout and iteration stages, offering a speed and flexibility difficult to match with manual work, even with the best modular kits.

Using PCG, we created dynamic biomes that allowed us to populate the world surrounding the Colony itself quickly and at scale — and critically, to do so in a way that supported full runtime randomisation on every play session. The videos below show the custom randomisation feature in action, reshuffling the world layout live as the game runs.

PCG and Blueprint systems were used to randomise asset layouts, dress buildings, and scatter props across the environment — turning a controlled asset library into a varied, lived-in world without manual placement of every element.

Shader work on Colony covered a wide range of needs and outcomes. At its core was the main environment material pipeline — a vertex colour and packed mask system that defined how all assets and structures needed to be built and textured, keeping draw calls low while maximising visual variety across the entire world. Beyond that foundation, the scope extended into specialised effects: dithering shaders used for gameplay-driven visibility purposes, faked ambient and indirect lighting effects that enhanced visual quality without adding GPU cost, and utility materials designed to make content creation faster, more modular, and non-destructive from first blockout through to final polish.