Highguard - King's Lair Base

This area was inspired by our Vesper City map artystyle, and the theme involved a secret oasis where a king brought his treasure and went into hiding with his crew.
In order to help with the base identity and make the silhouette stand out, we borrowed an early prototype cat model Patrick Yeung had made and I repurposed it to fit into the bigger rock shapes. The timeline for this task was tight so I mostly did world building, retro-fitting in a lot of Derek Bentley's existing desert rock kit to serve as the architecture and pillars. I tried to match Level Designer Dave Osei's oasis vision and keep his blockouts close to the concepts drawn out by Gabriel Brandt. Re-using Paul Tran's base kit and Jose Zavala's destructible walls helped keep our bases visual language consistent with other ones.
I was responsible for creating some of the gold props, modeling out the terrain and vert painting blends, adding foliage made by Jobye Kyle-Karmaker, and tweaking some existing materials in Unreal shaders made by other artists to fit the needs of the scene.
Jose Zavala helped with world building during bug fixing phase to address later gameplay changes. He was also essential in helping figure out how to get some of our terrain blends to work in level instances, compared to our bigger maps. We found solutions and I helped document some of it in Confluence to help our other teammates.
Lighting and water shader adjustments were done by Robert Taube. Other rock models were done by Jason McKenzie, and the throne prop made by Kevin Brunt. This task was a team effort making use of our Highguard asset library which was shared and contributed to by the other environment artists.

King's Lair Base was part of Season 1 of Highguard which shipped in January 2026 for the XBox Series S/X, PS5, and PC/Steam.

I adjusted Patrick's original cat model a lot for environment art use and tweaked his textures and Derek Bentley's rock material before adding it to the prop