Colony R&D documents the technical research and pipeline development that ran alongside the core environment production. Where the Colony project page presents the visual output, this page covers the systems and tooling that made it possible — procedural generation workflows, modular building frameworks, and Blueprint-based scattering and dressing systems, all built to deliver AAA-quality environments within the hard constraints of a mobile game.

As the sole environment artist on the project, building efficient and scalable tools was as critical as the art itself. Every system was designed with a non-destructive philosophy, enabling rapid iteration and prototyping without rebuilding from scratch. The work developed here fed directly into Sanctuary and established the procedural foundation for the wider Parallel environment pipeline.

I built a suite of procedural workflows in Unreal Engine 5's PCG framework, extended with external tools including Dash, to handle everything from large-scale world population to granular prop dressing. The core design principle throughout was non-destructive authoring — all systems were built to be fully iterable, enabling rapid prototyping of world layouts and environment configurations without losing work or requiring manual cleanup.

Each tool was shaped around Colony's specific constraints: mobile performance budgets, runtime randomisation requirements, and the need to populate large outdoor environments from a controlled source asset library. Owning the full stack — from the PCG graphs themselves through to the Blueprint systems driving runtime behaviour — meant the tools could be tuned precisely to each context, balancing visual quality, performance, and production speed at every stage.

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.