Alex's Dev Blog

Refining the Rag, Becoming the Ball

In the fall term of my junior year as a game design student, I teamed up with my game design comrades to create the game Ragball: a game where you can pick up and throw each other. Brilliant. I took up a role as one of the artists on the team, given the go-ahead for creation of UI and HUD assets.

One of my earlier assignments was defining the style guide for the game. We toyed with a few ideas, but eventually settled on the concept of a child playing with dolls, and built all the other assets around that concept. Hand-crafted objects, toys, an environment reminiscent of a kids room, and other decisions in that same vision.

One passion project of mine was the character select screen. I was given fairly free reign when it came to my designs, so I envisioned the idea for a diegetic character select screen. Put simply, diegetic design revolves around implementing a technical feature as a physical element of the world. In this case, instead of clicking through screens that would simply blink between each other, my vision for the character select had a drawer being opened, from which you could see the dolls inside as models instead of png files.

This idea got put on the backburner for more pressing matters, but much to my delight, it did eventually make it into the build we have today.

A first pass at the Character Select screen

What eventually became the diegetic menu

Ragball Trailer V1.mp4

A Terrific Trailer, A Virtuous Victory

My other major assignment in fall term was the creation of the trailer for our game. This undertaking proved to be a joy to work on, employing my skills with AfterEffects to put together something I'm frankly quite proud of. The in-game shots were all gathered through unity, and the music and sounds all royalty-free.

Through the quality of our game (and trailer), our team was selected as one of the three that would see their game progress and be developed further in the winter term!

Marvelous Models,

Diegetic Design

Winter term was begun, and Ragball was looking better than ever. Why, we were nearly in alpha! This term I specifically requested to be assigned some modeling tasks, as I felt my Maya muscles starting to atrophy from underuse. My first task? Goal pipes.

Not that there was anything wrong with the goal pipes we had, but they were surely not up to par with the design vision we had in mind. We needed a way to effectively meld our pipes with the theme of "handcrafted by a child". Our solution? A plastic funnel shoved into a cardboard paper towel tube. Brilliant. My duties involved creating this model and texturing it, creating a cardboard tube texture from scratch.

Now next, something exciting happened. Remember how I said that diegetic character screen idea got put on the backburner? Well I figured it was about time for me to turn up the heat. I got put onto a team of artists developing menu assets, and with my dear friend Lisa, we concocted our vision for not just a diegetic character screen, but a full diegetic MENU. Thrilling! You can read the details about it's implementation on Lisa's dev blog, but I hit the ground running, excited to see my baby come to life.

My focus shifted to creating the drawer model, and not just that but a desk for it to go into as well. These undertakings were exactly the modeling challenges I had desired for the term. I iterated upon the desk concept a couple times, but ultimately I settled on the desk you see here.

Velvety Voicelines, Soothing Shells

As the winter progressed, my duties shifted back to my old stomping ground: the trailer. We were rebuilding it from the ground up, and my stellar performance the first time around had earned me a spot on the new and improved trailer team. My assignment? Dub over our "corny toy commercial" trailer, in as corny and "kid friendly" a voice as I could muster.

On the side, I helped by modeling a seashell for our new "Rag of the Hill" gamemode, which is set in a sandbox.

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