We started off the capstone by prototyping three different games. The art team started off with concept sketches of the first prototype and then moved on to concept art.
The prototype was a dance em up (like a beat em up but with dance moves instead) in a Lovecraftian world. I sketched a roaring 1920's hotel that was corrupted by the Lovecraftian Horrors.
The main character is a pretty young flapper girl and the main villain is the King in Yellow, decked out in a suave golden suit.
The final concept was 1930s Spanish civil war instead. An idyllic coastal mountain town is struck by the horrors of war and Lovecraft.
Our second prototype was a shadow puzzle game.
A young shadow girl, and a boy with a flashlight help each other move through out the world.
A game that would be inspired by the beautiful wistfulness of Studio Ghibli would play out around an abandoned clock tower.
The story of the game evolved to only take place in the clock tower during a snow storm.
The last prototype was a hodgepodge of ideas: a co-op game where you protect a village from hordes of enemies while leading villagers on an escort quest to a shrine so that they can pray, giving you faith to level up.
For this one I was to come up with concepts for creepy enemies.
When I moved on to actual concept art they grew less creepy.
We ended up choosing the last prototype.
Since my art was more cute than creepy I was put in charge of creating concepts of the villagers. The villagers are meant to be cuter, smaller, more living versions of the main character who is the guardian spirit. After the prototyping phase the game dropped the escort quests and the co-op aspect. It was now a single player game where you protect the village and go out to explore the wilderness surrounding it.
These are my concepts of the villagers. We decided on a paperdoll system to make easily different villagers while using the same rig and base model.
These are my concepts of the villagers. We decided on a paperdoll system to make easily different villagers while using the same rig and base model.
We decided on a low poly style with flat shaders. As you can tell from the first image, the model is very low poly. The base model is under 400 polys and the clothing bits even less.
This is the final animations for the villagers. He happens to be wearing all the masks at once for fashion reasons. The animations are: walk, run, flee, cower, silly death, idle, stagger back, attack, death, and 5 more idles, and throw.
These are the three outfit variations and three of the six masks. The clothes are all interchangeable and there are multiple textures for each piece.
After the villagers were more or less done I moved on to other odd jobs and making sure my artists were getting theirs stuff done on time.
I helped one of my 3D modelers finish the artifacts that are found throughout the world. The ones in color are the ones I modeled and textured based on the icons for the artifacts.
That same artist who I helped make the models had made all the icons for them and they are beautiful. However, I realized that the axe icon she'd made didn't fit the right time period aesthetic so I created a new icon in the same style she had started with.
After working on the artifacts I moved on to player idle animations.
I moved on to making a reticle animation for charging up the ranged attack and for when you release the attack. It changes to red when you mouse over enemies and white when over nothing important.
In the end I did little things here and there but my biggest job was making sure everything we all made was cohesive and looked like it belonged in the world. We had plans of publishing this but it never happened. Here is a trailer we made to show off the game. It's not the the final build but it gives a pretty good idea of how the world, combat and everything turned out.