Craig Kohlmeyer

Walkabout Mini Golf
Myst

I really couldn’t wait to start on this one. Myst has had so many remakes over the years, each with their own distinct visual style. I never thought I’d have a chance to design my own.

Key Features:
Classic lighting in the daytime course. I did everything I could to preserve the lighting and coloration from the original game, but plus it up in a few key areas. The green water, the pale cyan sky, but with some added texture and effects to give it some new visual richness. I painted a sky texture that has very subtle cloud deformation (hard to see in the videos, but very present in VR). Added a rainbow into the mist to enrich the palette a little. Thick cloud particles swirl around the island in a way that helps capture the look from the old cover art. It was a joy to work on.

The Night Course Lighting. I crafted the lighting to match very closely to Zach Alexander’s concept art. He painted a frame of exactly what a view from hole 1 would look like; with round, orange lights attached to the observatory, and a deep, emerald sky, and I just tried to match that exactly, and then extrapolate it out to the rest of the course. I designed a lot of additional lights to attach to various parts of the course that would provide warm pools of light to pop off of the dark, cool backdrop. Mixing in just the right amount of height fog and rim light. It was a real pleasure to do this original take on Myst island.

My Role on Walkabout:
As Lead Technical Artist I worked both as our primary lighting/shader/fx artist and as a technician developing the tools and methods needed to achieve our vision, as well as optimizing the scenes to run well.

The target platform of Quest and Quest 2 made for some very interesting technical challenges. It requires rendering to multiple cameras, at high resolution, high frame rate, on mobile hardware. In addition, standard techniques involving Post Processes, URP Renderer Features, and additional cameras, are not options on that platform.

The artistic vision for each course, from both our designers and myself, would drive the methods and systems I created along the way.