Blank Slate Game Production
Project
We set out to craft an exciting gaming experience that transports players into a captivating storybook world filled with mystery, magic, and adventure. As the design team lead, I managed the visual development of the game, collaborating closely with my team, the project manager, development team, and audio team.
Approach
My responsibilities included setting and maintaining the game's overall visual direction. From creating concept art in procreate, 3D modeling, UV mapping, and animating in Blender, and texturing including texture atlases in photoshop and Krita, I helped design a world that resembles a storybook come to life. Bringing everything together in Unity, I ensured stylistic consistency in the output of the design team and across all visual elements in the game.
*Coming soon to STEAM.
Stills
Models
We kept the game low poly: The main character is ~3k polygons, the rabbit characters are ~1k polygons, while the main tree, the first one pictured here, is under 100 polygons and designed to be rotated to create a variety of tree shapes.
I created the player and rabbit characters, all of the main environment models, and some supplemental models as needed. I UV mapped them in Blender with textures I created in Photoshop and Krita.
UV Mapping and Texturing
Our custom shader creates a texture to provide a tactile paper look and gives a crosshatched ink texture to the shadows. In order to highlight the handmade feel the shader contributes to the visuals, we kept our other textures simple.
I created a single 4k texture atlas for the rabbit characters, an 8k texture atlas for all of my main environment elements, and an 8k texture for the world boundary walls in order to leverage Unity's draw call batching. This helped reduce strain on the system and keep our frame rate up, ensuring a smooth gaming experience.
In addition to mapping and texturing the models I created, I UV mapped and textured models made by other members of the team.
Animations
I rigged the player and rabbit characters and created custom animations for use in the game. Animations were created in Blender and brought into Unity where Animator Controllers were built for the different characters. I created scripts, custom layers, parameters, and animation masks and additions for dynamic interactions.
Particle Systems
We used particle systems as visual indicators of when something magical is occurring in the game. I created a slightly different system for each of the visual changes the player experiences, as well as a group of systems for the final level. I made the custom sprites for the systems in Photoshop and scripted the materials change and animation events in C#.
Process
The process of making the visuals for this game began with putting together artboards in Canva and considering stylistic preferences for depicting the story....does this section need an explination?????
CREDITS
Role: Visual Design Lead, 3D Modeling, Animation, UV Mapping, Texture Painting
Tools: Unity, Blender, Photoshop, Krita
Project Manager: Zoe Delap
Design Team: Bridget Kurr, Andrew Mires, Ava Fritz, William Gulick
Development Team: Brennan Crowder, Ben Krieger, Coleton Wheeler, Jacob Sharp, Haley Kelly, Jeremiah Underwood
Audio Team: Josh Lowery, Andrew Cross, Annette Lau, Blaine Grimes, Haiying Zeng
