A personal project developed during my 2023 Summer to familiarize myself with the Blender to Unity pipeline and working with scripts.
Game design, 3D modelling, programming, VFX and UI.
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Table of Contents
World-building & UI
I originally prepared a plot outline and story beats for a few maps which I was unable to implement, but it prepared me a lot on themes and aesthetic. The overall narrative was centered around a mysterious mad-inducing fog that the protagonist, a traveling apothecary, was trying to find a cure. She eventually settles in the town, Reddingvale, to mark her lab base, in where the residents often ask for an assistant on many issues as the only sane local healer.
To emphasize the genre of dark fantasy, I wanted difficult characters that were not always black or white. A mayor’s secretary who thought you were the source of the fog, for example, and constantly was trying to find ways in kicking you out. Visually, I relied on faded dark colours and wanted a motif of statues because of the eeriness of their void stares. You can see this reflected in my early sketch of the main UI. Sadly, a lot of elements had to be removed because I was unable to make the code function for it. For the inventory UI, I initially wanted a fancy scroll, but the colours were too cool-toned and silver wasn't matching the other UI's stone. I eventually thought it would be fun to make it look like an apothecary’s workstation, with scattered cloths and bowls to grind herbs. I did a quick sketch as to where the interactable components would be, and was able to easily get the design to my liking on the first attempt.
3D Asset Creation
This was my first time manually UV-unwrapping and doing original textures, and it was a very fun process. There were a lot of struggles at first, especially with not knowing how to optimize UV space for complicated objects (and whether it mattered), not knowing what canvas size a lot of the textures had to be, and how to implement it all into Unity. Because everything was in pixel art, I ended up building objects with planes that were sliced or folded and put together like building blocks, and while I feel there was a better way to do this, I ended up learning a lot of shortcuts and methods of troubleshooting.
Objects that were placed outside and in the town were exported, along with even tiles so that my level editor could piece them together. Interior levels such as the player’s cabin would be fully done in Blender to allow me to have all the textures on a single file. In the end, there were some spacing issues with the tile placement due to how I exported my files--which I only realized too many months later!
2D Style
I was very fortunate to have others help me with item illustrations as I knew painting them myself would take a lot of time. I used the art from Bloodborne as references for my artists, asking for detailed renders with lots of dark colours and textures for grit. Here I have shown a light orb I did myself, as well as edits I later painted over from my main illustrator.
Programming & Product
Even though I relied heavily on video tutorials to explain how to make a 3D farming game, I learned so much information that helped build my confidence and understanding of Unity basics. I am now more familiar with how to use scripts and animation, and more importantly, not be intimidated by the inspector and hierarchy tab. Another thing was that because I wanted features that were not included in the tutorial series I was following, such as fire effects, a fake cloud effect on the ground, and a lake, I was able to practice how to efficiently research terminology to help me (particle effects, cookie textures, and shaders for those previously stated topics).
The ending product, though, only being a video demonstrating some of the added elements, gave me ample opportunity to experiment a lot with both coding and visually decorating fields. Along with the shown systems of time, planting/harvesting, NPC interaction, inventory, scene switching, and relationships within the video, I was also able to add a little animal growing and interaction system! Overall, this was a great project I had the pleasure of adding my friends into while I spent half of the same summer working, and I hope to do something like it again some day.
COLLABORATORS
chiaki
Irene Wei
niqx
Sam Khan
Xiang Lin