Athiktos

Background

This is a team project for Advanced Game Design course during 2021 Fall term. We decided to create an open world exploration game. We decided the story and game will be set on a foreign planet because that gives us more freedom when designing the environment and creatures that inhabit the planet.

Process

Concept Art

My role shifts as the game develops. I started off as the concept artist, my main concern is to design the overall look of the potential environment, characters and any objects in the game world based on the narrative I was given. At that stage the main problem for us is that we need an environment that is easy to create in terms of we can reuse assets with variation on the texture or material, and we have to use a low poly art style as that reduces the modeling time and reduce the computing resources needed as we would not have that much time on optimizing the game later in the line.

The Protagonist, Our Player

When making the first designs, I opted for a more cartoonish style when drawing the player character as exaggerated postures help to convey my version of personality I think the main character have during team meetings.

It also helps visualize the personality since our character's face is not visible and we cannot use facial expression to show the character's feeling. The interaction sketch is also my suggestion on possible interaction during the gameplay, such as how is the player going to collect spaceship parts, etc.

The following is the sketch idea for the player's animation after the appearance and personality of them are approved by the team. I made some adjustments after discussing what kind of interactions we are going to implement, mainly discarding the collecting animation and adding in the aiming post.

The World and Its Inhabitants

During the ideation phase, we have 4 types of subworld: mushroom forest, crystal cave, ice jungle, and the desert. The mushroom forest is the first subworld we worked on as we confirmed how and what assets we can reuse throughout the map so that there will be enough time to work on the game. For its design, I proposed for it to have giant mushrooms that the player can jump on so that there are more areas and means for the player to explore. For its aesthetic, I designed it to be a darker environment because I want to show the glowing part of the mushrooms to create a mystic and fantastic atmosphere.

I create 2 types of creatures during the drafting phase. One of them has more human-like features, while the other is more animal-like. The reason for that is that we first envision the planet to have some sort of alien civilization, and I think a more human-like upper torso is easier to imagine for them to create and use tools, while the more animal-like ones are more adapted to the natural environment. I also suggested having variations that correspond to each subworld of the game because 1: it ties the creature to the subworld that makes it more grounded in the story, while 2: it can enrich the environment while only requiring small adjustment to the base model to create a variation.

Modeling and Animation

Why Blender

Blender is my choice of 3D software instead of Maya for this project for a number of reasons despite the fact that I have never used Blender before this project and I would have to learn from the basics. Firstly, there are more community resources that are easy to find online that cover most techniques I need for the project. Secondly, it is a light-weight software that runs faster on my computer than Maya, which helps with making the modeling and animating process go smoothly. Thirdly, as Blender is a combination of different tools (modeling, sculpting, animation,etc), I would like to use this opportunity to learn one of the tools first and expand on it after this project.

Building the World

I started modeling the character models first before starting on the environments as there are more details I need to consider, especially preparing those models for animating. I encountered some problems during the making of the player model, mainly because I did not realize I needed to put it in a T-pose, and the arm pit area deforms unnaturally when I tried to animate it. Luckily the problem is found early and with the experience of making the first model, the second model is created quickly with better topology at the shoulder and hip area where the arms and legs are connected to the torso. I built the base creature model and made variations from it, such as adding wiggle bones to the ice variant as it has more fur, adding that adding that can give it a softer feel. For the environment objects, I used random nodes for material and particle systems quite a bit to create a cluster of things, which makes the process easier for me and saves time.

Making It Move

Since the animations are going to loop depending on their state in-game, I animated and saved each animation using nonlinear animation tracks. By doing so, I can export animations with the models as a set to unity and makes it easier for the programmer to know which animation is tied to a model.

Here are some animations used in the game.

Final Thoughts and Reflection

As a first-timer doing 3D models and animations for games there are a lot of things I could have done better. This time I purposefully avoided using texture because I don't have enough time to create a good texture or a good UV so that it would look normal at all angles. Also, I should have used video references for animating the characters because I just used pose-to-pose to animate movements, and I think the timing is off that it gives some uncanny feeling to viewers.

A Bit More About This Project

Check out the Athiktos project website to learn more about this project