I didn’t work a lot on the game itself these past two weeks, focusing more on adjacent portfolio work.
Environment Art for Portfolio
I’m starting a new big project for my portfolio, focusing on sci-fi and hardsurface. I gathered a lot of reference and replayed and reviewed old screenshots of games with an art style matching what I want, mainly Titanfall 2, Doom 2016, The lab sections in Resident Evil 2/3 Remake and 5, Death Stranding.
It’s a bit broad, meant as a 10 minute experience including dialog and cutscenes, and I’ll will focus more on showcasing my programming skills (I’m not an expert, but I think it’s a big plus for an environment artist). It will be like a vertical slice, showing different kinds of areas, some neat, some old and hidden, some vegetation in green houses, warehouses and storage areas, and even a train ride outside showing the harsh environment.
I don’t have a lot to show right now, but I programmed a few mechanics :
Companion Drone
I wanted to include a companion drone that follows you around, and also serves as a flashlight when needed.
It has 5 predefined hovering positions (left shoulder, right shoulder, front left, front right, over the head) relative to the player, and it switches randomly between them. It gives it a bit of character for very little effort.
It’s a bit basic, and I haven’t programmed player avoidance yet, but it does its job. I added an activation feature, where it only joins you if you approach it first. I also wanted to see how it’ll work with several of them at the same time just for fun.
With that said, have some bugs and fails:
This is a very basic sketch of the design, made by mirroring the Simurgh (robot) head and rotating a duplicate 90°. It looks like a very good starting point, especially because the shape language works really well with the robot character.
Activating Objects
I made a reusable blueprint for activating objects. It’s very simple : when you are close enough it plays the activation animation, and when you get far away for long enough (eg. >5 seconds) it plays the same animation in reverse.
All I have to do is to drag it into the level and pick a skeletal mesh and animation assets and adjust the activation distance and waiting time and other parameters if needed.
Metal Structure Trimsheet
I worked on a trim sheet for background metallic structures and industrial machines and factories/refineries/warehouses…etc. It’s meant for background use, so the texel density is only 512px/m, but the models still hold up well up close, as long as you’re not immediately next to them (or in first person mode).
The entire model uses one material. I used a second UV channel and a color palette to set the colors of the different parts of the model, and also baked AO to the vertex color and used it as an input for additional dirt (The master material taken from my game already supports this, and can combine texture AO and vertex AO, and use them to apply dirt).
I used ZenUV to help speed things up. Here’s a short demo of the texturing workflow.
And finally I made a rusty metal plate material in Substance Designer capable of generating different patterns.
Amaterasu
This is not really related, but I still wanted to share it here anyway. It’s a collab between Bl3iz-du and I. She made the sculpt, and I’m taking care of retopo, rigging and shading.
I focused a bit on the shading, I wanted to make it look similar to the original game, but also distinct and unique enough.
For the texturing, I made a base color texture, and also a “shading” texture that I combined with an outline effect to emphasize some parts, like the wrinkles on her snout and the fluffy cheeks. It’s not a static effect, and it gets stronger or disappears depending on the angle. Finally I added an inverse hull outline (generated with geometry nodes, but can be done manually), using the same shading texture to add some variety and texture to it. It works really well.
I’ll rig and give it a battle pose/animation later, but for now I’ll focus a bit on the game and portfolio pieces.
Misc
I played a few games this week, mainly Another World and RatShaker and TitanFall 2.
Another world was good, despite the sluggish and unresponsive controls. It was punishing and the puzzles were well done, which is definitely reflective of the era it was made in.
RatShaker was surprisingly good too. It was very weird and questionable, but it quickly became a horror game with a lot of gore and disgusting content, which I wasn’t expecting, but I wasn’t bothered. It had some “puzzles” (avoiding ways to die), which is similar to Another World in a way, and it wasn’t too long. I appreciate the weirdness of it all.
And finally I played TitanFall 2 until the end. I started doing it for the screenshots (which I did take. 300+ of them), but I continued because it was fun. I usually don’t life FPS games, especially modern controls (CoD, Apex…) and prefer games like Half-Life 1/2 and Doom Eternal, but Titanfall 2 is the exception. I especially liked the verticality and freedom of movement and the variety in the gameplay. The time travel levels were something else, I have never seen it done seamlessly like that in any other game, and it was fun doing the parkour puzzles across timelines. The story was good, and the character of BT was very well written.
I also played some Assetto Corsa EVO, I love the weaker vechicle classes.
I had a consultency session with Christina/GigglyGuineaPig about UI design, mainly about fonts, UI style and how to approach it, accessibility, and she suggested several interesting ideas for my game. It was great, and I definitely recommend her services.
That’s all for this devlog. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you next time!