Development: 3-4 months
Team: 5 students, 6th semester HTW Berlin Game design
Software: Maya, Blender, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Topogun, Marmoset
Plattform: PC
First-Person Extraction Shooter (Unreal Engine 5.2)
Cavenger is a survival-focused extraction shooter that blends high-stakes looting with tactical decision-making. Set in a world where Earth’s rotation has stopped, players explore hostile underground complexes through remotely controlled, fully modular robots. Each run challenges players to scavenge resources, body parts, and weapons—customizing robots across head, torso, arms, and legs to unlock new combat and movement abilities.
Progress is fragile: death means losing all loot, while successful escapes allow players to repair, trade, and upgrade their stats and equipment at the facility’s workbench. Runs begin with minimal gear, encouraging adaptive strategies, experimentation, and replayability.
We initially set out to create a roguelike experience where the player collects body parts to continuously upgrade their character. One of our main objectives was to deliver high-quality assets alongside the gameplay.
Due to time constraints, the concept was refined into a single playthrough level, while retaining the core mechanic of acquiring and assembling body parts. To support this feature, we developed a modular robot that could be split into individual components.
I began by creating silhouettes and defining the enemy art style as “mechanical beetles.” This Robot took inspiration from a cockroach. With the style direction established, I moved on to blocking proportions in ZBrush, applying techniques similar to those used in Horizon Zero Dawn to achieve a mechanical yet organic look.
For the leg, I used Mari to paint the displacement maps, ensuring a clean and detailed result. To optimize the UV layout, I mirrored as many elements as possible and adjusted pixel density to emphasize areas of visual interest.
The robot was fully hand-retopologized and textured in Substance Painter, utilizing multiple texture sets to achieve a higher level of quality and detail. Marmoset and Substance both were used to get the best baking results.
To add more gameplay depth, we initially planned to block the main bridge with a turret that the player would need to deactivate via a generator in order to progress. Unfortunately, the turret was cut from the final build, as implementing it would have required an additional week of development.
The turret itself was created using a combination of Maya and ZBrush. Throughout the process, I received consistent feedback to make the design appear more aggressive, as the earlier iterations looked too playful—a point I fully agreed with and refined accordingly. For the initial concept Ai was used to create a concept.
We had the opportunity to showcase the game on the big screen during the Hive Summer Event, where it drew attention and even featured quite a long playthrough. There’s something uniquely exciting about seeing your own character in-game—especially when they fire back at you.
One of my biggest takeaways from this project was learning to fully leverage ZBrush for hard-surface sculpting, which I ended up enjoying far more than I initially expected.
Our team consisted of five members: Janina, David, Farshid, Adrian, and myself. A special thanks to everyone for their collaboration in achieving this result.
