Semester 3 Week 7 (Game Jam Postmortem)

My fifth game jam (there's no way I've done five already) is finished! I'll say right upfront: I'm pretty sure this is my favorite game I've finished yet, including non-jam games. Everyone agrees that, despite a few flaws, its a the gameplay and visuals are all a blast. I'm so proud of it. I'm proud of the team, and myself. LETS GOOOOO!

As I mentioned in the previous post, we had a slightly unorganized and rocky start. After that, though, we restructured and I was made art lead. I was exited and grateful that my team would pick me for the role, but of course I was nervous because if the visuals flopped it would be on me. With great power comes great responsibility (an appropriate quote, as our gameplay feels very spider-man-y). I decided to go with a bold and risky look. I was met with some resistance, mostly from programmers. I get it, they're putting a lot of trust in my vision. If it doesn't pan out and its too hideous for anyone to play, then all they're hard work programming will be for naught. I wasn't sure the look would pan out either. But I pressed on.

To summarize the visual style, its a low poly, toon shaded world with a Meow Wolf color palette. I'm happy I got a break from the PBR workflow of Fid Emma. Most of the heavy lifting was done by the post-process material. I'd never worked with post-process before, so I learned a ton. I used sobel operations to outline objects. Initially, I tried to create a cel shader, but encountered some issues. I fiddled with it and found that if I used PostProcessOutput0 to use the lit version of the scene, I could use BaseColor to make it unlit. We didn't need lighting for gameplay, and I liked the look, so I stuck with it.

One more thing I came upon sort of on accident was that if I used a certain VectorNoise, it would put a pixelated filter on every object, making it look sorta like Minecraft. All that despite none of the objects being unwrapped or textured. I still don't entirely understand how that's possible, but I like it nonetheless. There were countless times when the post process would interfere with some visual element, causing a total mess. But after troubleshooting, there was always a solution. I hesitate to call myself a technical artist, but I did spent the majority of my time in Unreal, which counts for something!

The first asset I worked on was the bamboo, which is a tweaked cylinder array deformed to a curve, with custom collision boxes. Every asset in the game uses one or more of six materials. The base color of these materials are taken from a data table with vectors for each color, which keeps thing organized and centralized. There is one exception to this rule, being the bamboo's leaves. Rather than have a handful of polys per leaf, each leaf has one poly, and uses an alpha masked two sided material to give it shape. I made the alpha mask in Substance Designer, which really wasn't necessary. I could've achieved the same look quicker in Photoshop, but it works just fine. Some bamboo has leaf canopies. This was done in the same way as the other leaves, but on a hemisphere with a denser alpha mask.

The largest part of our art efforts was spent crating structures that contain the objective cats. There are a bunch of these, ranging from small campsites to massive fortresses. I made a village, but the rest were created by other artists. They look good! There were some hiccups with collisions, but we overcame them. Liam was gracious and made an artist-friendly data table tool where we could set spawn rates, where enemies spawn, where cats are placed, and what type of objective a given structure would support. Round of applause for Liam.

The objective of the game is to retrieve Japanese lucky cats, and I made the asset for them. I based it off of a concept Kara drew, which has very cool shades and a secret scroll. Lots of personality. Ideally, I would've sculped it in Zbrush. At this point in the jam, though, it was the weekend and we were at home. I adapted and used Blender's sculpting tools. It really wasn't too bad. The result was good, and I was able to build my confidence sculpting in a package that I'm more familiar with. Blender doesn't retopo as well as Zbrush as far as I know, so I took a hackier but ultimately functional approach. I sculpted with disregard to polycount. Once I finished, I applied a decimate modifier

One last thing I should discuss is my role as art lead. Honestly, I think it went really well! The end result was a good looking game and a lot of learning by everyone. What more can you ask for? Each of the five other arguments all had different levels of experience, different roles to fulfill, and different communication needs. All of them besides Kara had little to no experience with pipelines involving Unreal or GitHub. Luckily, I love teaching and I love talking about pipelines. Perfect combo. One of our artists was new to Blender, too, so they learned a lot! It was difficult to be pulled away from my own work to teach basics, but its good to pay it forward and help others learn however I can. I really enjoyed being art lead, and I hope to do so again!

Good game, good time.

Play it here:

https://drew-abegg.itch.io/cyber-ninja