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Anchor 1
BA PROJECT
Download Link
Project Info:
Development time: 7 weeks
Status: Released
Roles and contributions:
This was a solo projec
Main areas of focus were:
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Game & Level Design
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VFX
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3D art
Tools:
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Unity
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Autodesk Maya
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Visual Studio
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Photoshop
My Bachelor project, which I took as an opportunity to explore and push my abilities in the fields that I am enthusiastic about such as: VFX, 3D art, level design.
The pillars for the idea were constructed early (audio input to VFX graph) which gave me space to experiment and to find a cohesive art style.
My project was designed with the main goal of testing my thesis which explores the concept of flow in toy-like interactive experiences.
(You can read my thesis here). To achieve this goal, I aimed to create an open-ended interactive experience that would enable players to exercise a high degree of agency over the interactions. By doing so, I hoped to better understand the utilization of flow into player-game interaction contexts and to gain a deeper understanding of its impact on user engagement and satisfaction.
INITIAL STEPS
LEVEL DESIGN AND 3D ART
To begin my design process, I typically seek inspiration and references to support my concepts.
In this particular project, I was looking to create a style that was both streamlined and minimalist, without being too time-consuming to model. After researching a variety of futuristic styles, I ultimately drew inspiration from both retro futurism and neo futurism.
By combining elements from these two styles, I was able to create clean, simple shapes that feel familiar yet distinct. For example, I incorporated angular lines and geometric shapes reminiscent of retro futurism, while also using minimalist and organic shapes associated with neo futurism.
Analyzing and extracting shapes and creating new shapes that conform to a "new" design language requires a good amount of trial and error. It is also challenging to maintain consistency with your shapes throughout the entire structure. One way that I use to simplify this process if by asking myself whether the design looks like it belongs to the same entity.
It all starts with a shape
THREE ATTRACTION POINTS
To avoid overcomplicating the experience and to stay focused, I limited myself to three key gameplay elements. To make these elements more engaging for players, I incorporated toy-like characteristics that encourage interaction. Throughout the development process, I followed a design philosophy of maximizing player agency and interactivity. For example, elevators in video games are generally just a one button linear interaction that changes levels (have narrative significance, are used to load levels etc.). By giving the player higher agency over the mechanic and rewarding them with immediate visual stimulus (VFX, animation) allows them to control the nature of interaction itself which adds more depth to it.
THE ELEVATOR
The player has full control over the elevator movement. It has automated open/close/lock animations and it translates between the different floors with a “SmoothDamp” function that results in a satisfying movement.
Moreover, I tied the VFX with the animation and made it follow the position of one of the components in the elevator as shown in the gifs above.
MAIN AND TOP FLOOR VFX
Both of the effects are audio reactive to the microphone voice input data stream. It was important that the VFX felt like a part of the environment and not incongruous to it. For the future, I would definitely like to design a level where the focus is rather on the variety of the VFX and utilization of the microphone input more.
VFX BREAKDOWN
Original tree mesh
Particles emitting from
tree mesh sufrace points using point cache bake tool
Using the point cache bake tool we generate points on the surface of the mesh to spawn particles from. The actual model is not rendered in scene, it is only used to spawn and manipulate the particles.
There are two game objects that have the spectrum analyzer component which receive an audio stream and applies the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) algorirthm to get the spectrum data. It normalizes the spectrum values by using the same algorithm as Audio Level Tracker.
The audio level trackers then output a value between 0-1 which we can then multiply by an exposed factor that we can manipulate to adjust the effect to our preference. As shown in the image above, the low pass audio filter data stream is fed to the intensity plug of the turbulent force that applies on the particle system, and the high pass audio filter data stream is fed to the drag plug.
For more information about the original plug-in by Keijiro read here.
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