A project between my friend and I that was initially for a 9-day Game Jam entry. While unfinished, I had the opportunities to practice making assets inspired by N64 games.
Game design, 3D modelling, UI, 2D concept art and illustration.
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Table of Contents
Game Design
Pre-production between the both of us included coming up with ideas and developing the gameplay together. Although there was the struggle of time zones, we eventually settled on a puzzle adventure game inspired by the Legend of Zelda series. To make this idea work, we wanted to incorporate the theme in the ending cutscene, and focus primarily on the game experience itself. I then created moodboards to make sure we were on the same page before production.
Character Design
For the player character, we wanted her to be based off of ringtails because of their mobility and cuteness. The world setting was set in a mythical forest and temple which prompted all my designs to be fantasy-based. We also wanted each dungeon to be based on a season, and each dungeon to have a new monster so my designs were themed on that. I wanted an insect monster to reflect Spring, golem for Summer, vulture for Autumn, and a mammal for Winter.
Character Models
Here are the final character models I prepared. This was my first time doing anything with vertex colours within Blender and my first instinct was to treat it like painting a character. if I were to do this again, I would definitely use symmetry for the colours as I thought it would look more interesting with manual vertex colors, but instead, it was noticeable when a bunch of the same enemies were standing side-by-side.
Environment Creation
We wanted our build to be playable on browser so optimization was an important value when creating assets. I made some basic assets to be used for puzzles, though that was never functionally ready besides the spear that can be used to swing across gaps to reach heights. Models either were given world-aligned materials or were UV unwrapped for simple low resolution Substance Painter textures.
UI Assets
I was inspired by old adventure games and noticed that they liked icons with wood accents and primitive shapes for item slots. The heart HP slots eventually evolved into apples, partly because we wanted to incorporate them into the environment, but also because the shape language was overall more engaging to look at. Item slots initially started out as a gem which then eventually settled into a dug pit as a nod to the player character's treasure seeking personality.
Illustrations
To tie in the game's narrative, I wanted illustrations that resemble title cards in cartoon animation shows. This began to really develop a classic cartoon aesthetic that was repeated throughout the game.