QUICK SUMMARY:

Project – Unity Sidescroller with dimension changing gameplay elements in a team of 5 students.

What I have done – Level and Concept Design, Game Design, Asset Creation, Animation, Lighting, Texturing and much more. The whole project was created from scratch inside the Unity engine.

The project is divided in two parts – the presentation in the first half (with renderings and a link to the game) and breakdown in the second half.

Created in 17 weeks, BLIGHT VOICE was our first 3D-sidescroller project at the HTW Berlin.

The prototoype of blight voice was done in a team of four and everyone had their special area of work they excelled in. Whilst others worked on code and concept art, I was what I would call a „project generalist“. Fom animation, modelling and texturing I also developed our visual style guide and partially level design. In this block I’d like to present you the workflow and how we created BLIGHT VOICE – its a long one!

You can play the prototype here!

You want a brief overview of the project? You can read the booklet here!

I. Concept

As the first 3D sidescroller experience we worked a lot on our artstyle-, gameplay- and coreconcept. Creating thumbs and speedpaints to establish a mood was key to communicate our ideas inside the group. Especially since due to Covid we had to work completely remote and had to rely on Discord and online meetings – sometimes a blessing and sometimes it complicated a lot of the communication.

During development an inital idea can change completely, but a few key elements can stick and shape the overall design and may establish the core-gameplay loop. In our case the whole project started with a few important aspects we wanted to incorporate into the game, like a very deep combat system that depends on maneuvering, deflecting and counters. The player was supposed to feel small and vulnerable, something our environment should reflect and also strenghten via giant buildings and temple constructions.

In the end we changed this concept with a more enemy-focused approach. Means, that creatures in the world shall feel like actual animals and fit in the environment we drop them in – and require different strategys from the player to either get past them or use them in the players favor.

A second sight mechanic was introduced that let the players „phase“ between two different realities. In one reality a stone or segment of a wall might not be there, thus enabling the player to move forward. This was the cornerstone of many puzzles and encounters our prototoype has to offer and got more complex over time and with the progression of our game!

The change of realities also introduced our companion, a helpfull little character the player can switch to. By having two basically two protagonists it was very important to balance them equally – whilst the small companion can fly and manipulate light objects, the human character can interact with heavy objects and is the main moving force in the game.

All these key elements enabled us to further expand our level design and we went full on with our development! But due to our limited time, the story part suffered a bit. I wrote a visual style guide which also incorporates a few of our worldbuilding themes and it helped to crate new assets and shape the creatures and characters.

With that much prepwork done, it was time to create some more concept sketches for our game!

I also tried to conceptualize the interaction with the creatures of the world. In this example, the player uses the companion to power an old generator like construct, that seemingly awake this giant beetle. With controll over the beetle, the player can move the mushroom plattform safely to the other side!

II. Leveldesign

After all this concept stuff I got to work on our unity prototype. We split up development of the different level section among the team to speed up production. Especially seeing how the Unity blockouts changed over time is always amazing.

I started working on the Intro Level and the temple entrance. Lots of stuff was created during that phase, from tree assets and terrain work such as painting and sculpting and rendering inside Unity. Light can massively improve a scene, and when working on a sidescroller I think it is a very nice touch to work with depth in the scenery. For instance, the cave beneath the broken tiles is very long and the player can look into the structure thus creating this illusion of a giant cave system.

III. Characters And Creatures

After I worked on the level stuff I shifted my focus to the two main protagonists of our game – well, the three characters actually. To safe time we reduced our creature count to a single, fleshed out enemy with unique mechanics and soon had to start on the textures of our main characters.

As we established in the design concept, some creatures are able to change realitys like the player – and these monsters do have a distinctive look. Fishlike and alien with bright colours and weird limbs. I created some sketches as well.

My workflow usually involves a simple blockout in 3DsMax or another 3D programm and then move over to ZBrush to refine the rough concept and sculpt the details. After that stage is done I either use the ZBrush tools to generate the lowpoly version or come back to Maya or 3DsMax to some retopo. For this project I went ahead and skinned and rigged the creature so we could use rough animations inside the Unity prototoype – I like to use CAT for this kind of work.

Texturing was done in Substance Painter where I created completely new materials for the creature and the player character. I put a heavy focus on the bright colours and alien look of the creature and tried to make him standout as something unusuall from our colour palett we used in the levels.

The player needed to stand out as well, but shouldnt be to catchy. Saturated and bright colours were needed to make him visible in the dark caves. Due to our time constraints we reduced the amount of details in the companion that was supposed to be a small flying animal. In the end I created a quick sculpt of some ancient looking construct that flies over the player character. And some emissive textures helped eleviating the design from the rest of world.