Keira

2D Artist, 3D Artist, Storyteller

Winter Quarter 25-26

Week 1 - Figuring Out the Pivot

This week we spent a lot of deliberating on what we wanted to change for the remainder of this project. We decided on pivoting to mech v mech instead of mech v monster, and getting rid of the teleporting inbetween the rooms.

For this week, I remade the core shell and split into two, leaving room for more movement and dynamic traversal. I also made a physical room for the pilot room, with a control console for looks. The player sits in the chair and achieves pilot status, opening up the pilot menu that allows a player to choose an action and view the fight.

New promo art featuring an enemy mech

Week 2 - Models for the Medbay & Redoing the Exterior City

I made a testing tube for the medbay chamber with four textures for each color engineer. The idea is that players spawn in these medbay chambers, and each time a player dies another player needs to bring their body back to the tube to revive them. I created a prefab for Ariel, who is adding the functionality, to work off of. I decorated the medbay chamber with pipes and added a plugin for players to place a battery.

I also added new building models to the scene for Dan to turn into a procedurally generated city. I then added neon lights to make the city look alive. In the future I am going to add emission to some of the windows for a more dynamic scene.

Medbay prefab with pipes and a battery plug in

Week 3 - Shader Work & Exterior City Changes

This week I was able to create working shaders to add to the visual feel of our game. I made two shaders and one render texture. The first shader is a toon shader, which adds harsh shadows to the models. The second is a dithering shader, which adds this pixelated dithering effect over everything and changes based on color value. The render texture adds a pixelate effect to things. I am going to experiment more with these & the lighting in the mech to create a final visual look for the game.

As for the exterior city, I modeled stadium stands that float around the fight to really emphasize the mech v mech feeling. In the future, we are going to animate the stadium stands getting punched and thrown around by the mechs during the fight. Also retextued the medbay to feel more medicinal.

Toon Shader on the left vs. what we had before

Pixelate render texture

Dithering Shader applied to render texture

Week 3 - Shader Work & Exterior City Changes

Week 4 - New Core Shells & Interactive Lobby

Week 5 - Parts Manager UI

Week 6 - New Collidable Objects

Week 7 - Admitted Students Day

Week 8 - Mech Generator

Week 9 -

Week 10 -

Fall Quarter 25-26

Week 1 - Creating the Mech, Player Character, and Monster

In the beginning, I felt like it was a little bit hard to get moving, and I'm sure other people felt the same way. After we decided to do a poll with all the ideas that we came up with, we got together to settle on one of the top three. This ended up being a monster-fighting mech game, so I spent a lot of time this week working on concepts for the mech, player character, and main monster that the players would be fighting.

I started out with three designs for both the mech and the player character, then sent them to my teammates to get their opinions. My teammates loved the 3rd design for the player character, so I was able to immediately draft a final design concept for the character.

I also created concepts for player roles, which is something that we threw around for a little bit; depending on the player's chosen role - pilot, plumber, welder, etc. - the hat on their player character would change. This is something we aren't entirely sure of keeping yet, so I didn't include it in the final character reference sheet.

For the mech, however, the vote was split between the 1st and the 3rd design, so I decided to create 5 more design iterations. All designs feature a sword, which everyone - including myself - loved in the designs.

The first two designs are a combination of the 1st and 3rd design; people loved the angularity of the 1st design, and the bulkiness of the 3rd, so I tried my best to create designs that properly combined the two. For the 3rd, 4th, and 5th designs, I designed more iterations based on the third design only. Initially, when I asked my teammates to vote on which of the first three mech designs they liked the most, the 3rd design had 5 votes while the 1st only had 3 (the 2nd didn't get any). So, I prioritized making iterations for the 3rd design specifically to see what I could do with the bulkiness of the mech.

The mech's design is still in iteration, but this time my teammates were more drawn specifically to the 4th design. I plan on making just a few more iterations of the 4th design, then we can decide on a final mech,

The monster is a bit of a different story. We plan on only having one monster in the game, so we aren't overwhelmed with creating the model and all the different attack animations. I wanted to create a monster that felt iconic and would be entertaining even if players saw it over and over again. I created a bunch of different designs.

The problem comes with deciding how we want the monster to look. Some of my teammates want a dorkier-looking monster - something that fits in with the design for the mech and player character. Other members of my team want something that looks more like an iconic kaiju monster, or even an eldritch horror. I tried my hardest to create designs for more, with designs 1, 4, and 5 looking scarier and intimidating, while designs 3 and 6 look a little bit dumber in nature. Design 2 feels like a perfect in-between of both an eldritch terror and something more foolish.

The monster's design is also still in the works. I am partial to the more dorky designs, since I feel like they fit in with the fun, friendslop game we are creating. I am definitely going to create a wider variety of monster designs until we can all settle on something that we like. I'm going to focus on creating horror-like designs, dorkier designs, and golden in-between designs for the future. This way, I can design something that is satisfying to everyone on the team, but also fits in with the artwork, models, and visuals of the game.

Week 2 - Refining & Finalizing the Mech

This week, I focused solely on designing the final mech. I sketched out a final design, then threw together 10 colored concepts for my teammates to vote on. We wanted to create a mech that fit into a neon environment, so I tried to emulate that in my initial color concepts. After my teammates voted on all ten, we came to a tie between design #7 and design #10. We did one more round of voting, between just the two designs, and design #10 won in a landslide. So, I took that design and began working on the final mech reference sheet.

The final mech reference sheet shows a mech turn around, as well as an action shot to fit the mech into the environment. We decided that in part of the story, the mech's production would be hastily expedited by a handful of sponsors, so I wanted to create some logos of potential brands that would sponsor the mech fighting in this universe. A lot of the personality of each of these sponsors will show up in posters/advertisements around the interior of the mech.

The mech battles will be streamed on this universe's streaming platform "Click." We decided that this would be a major way that the sponsors bring in money to fight the monsters. That is why there are drones flying around the mech - the fights with the monsters are being constantly livestreamed to an online audience.

Going into next week, I am going to try and finish the official monster design. I think this is going to be the hardest to figure out because I think that everyone on the team wants something different for the monster. Still, I am going to try and make everyone as happy as possible with my monster designs so that everyone can feel a little bit more connected with the game they are building. Moving forward after that, I am most likely going to be helping with the modeling, texturing, and 2D promotional artwork.

Week 3 - The Monster

This week, I focused primarily with creating the concept art for the final monster. I created three verbal descriptions for what the monster could look like, and asked my teammates for their opinion. We landed on "A bipedal monster with the obvious capacity to land a mean punch. Aggressive spikes and daunting teeth. A glowing core sits deep inside the beast, pulsing with a hostile energy. Covered in scars from previous attacks where it emerged victorious."

From that prompt, I made these four designs. I went a little bit rogue from the original verbal prompt and added webs, but unfortunately, the webs aren't something that we decided to keep. We liked the boxing pose of the 3rd monster, so I created another design focused on a boxing silhouette and played around a little bit more with the spikes.

This is the sketch of the design I ended up coming up with. It's attractive, but also has an aggressive and daunting attitude to it. I added more spikes and scales, and leaned much more into the boxing pose that the 3rd design had.

I created a full ortho for the 3D modelers, as well as an action shot that puts the monster into the world it exists in.

Week 4 - The Environment

This week, my main task was to create partially rendered sketches for what the external environment would look like. I started with a verbal description, which read: "A long strip of concrete surrounded on either side with a surplus of skyscrapers. The strip leads directly to the ocean, where the radioactive monster appears. On either side of the long strip of pavement, right before the skyscrapers start, there are piles of rubble where buildings clearly once stood. The city has turned the decimated land into an area for the monster to fight the mech." I then moved to creating initial sketches that show how the layout would look. We had two ideas: 1) an alleyway, and 2) an arena style opening. We ended up going with the arena style, as it pushes our narrative that the city is profiting off of the mech vs monster fights.

I then created a couple of very simple, colored sketches (left). These sketches were simply just to show different perspectives of what the mech fight would look like in 3D. These sketches were made to also show off different lighting schemes: the top shows more of a fiery atmosphere, while the bottom looks as if it has been lit by a powerful sunset.

Moving towards the partially rendered sketch (right), I decided to lean more towards purple lighting, as that fit in with our neon theme a little bit more. The 3D scene would just be a bunch of modeled buildings placed in a circle around the "arena."

This partially rendered sketch of the city shows off a lot of the same advertisements that you see on the mech. Once again, this is pushing our narrative that the city is an example of late-stage capitalism, where they are profiting off of the disaster that they produced.

Week 5 - Modeling the Environment

For week 5, I worked on creating building models for the exterior environment that the player would see outside of the mech. Our idea was that the buildings closer to the mech fight would look more run-down, while the buildings further from the fight would be more pristine, polished, and upkept. This makes sense with our game's story; the city would rather the fight take place in less fortunate areas so they can maintain the status of the richer parts of the city.

I started out with modeling 5 buildings - 2 skyscrapers and 3 residential buildings. I experimented with two sample textures, one for a skyscraper and one for a residential building. I will be working during week 6 to finalize the models that will be filling out the exterior environment.

Residential building with a sample texture in Maya.

View from temp camera

Week 6 - Finishing the Exterior Environment

This week, I focused on finishing the exterior environment. This meant finalizing all models, texturing, and adding them to a Unity scene.

I finalized textures for the 5 models I made last week, and also added two more models for some diversity. I used Blockbench to texture all of the buildings, which I modeled in Maya. In the future, I am going to mess around with lighting, as well as maybe adding some more buildings. I also want to mess around with the camera a little bit, to see how we want the scene to look in game. It's most likely going to be an aerial view, since the action is being shot from "drones."

Blockout w/o textures

Aerial view w/ textures

Other side view

Week 7 - Redoing the Exterior Environment

After some thought, we decided to remake the exterior environment. We thought that including all the models I made would be too much geometry, and the buildings seemed too large compared to the mechs.

For the new city environment, I split the city scene into PNGs and models. Some of the buildings are images I took of the buildings I made, which I then turned into a material and pasted onto a flat plane. To make the illusion of the city seem more convincing, I broke up the PNGs with actual models.

I then created functional cameras that spin around the mech fight, acting like drones. The player can swap between a close-range shot, mid-range shot, and far-range shot. This allows the pilot to see any exterior damage.

Week 8 - Models for Objects

This week, I worked on creating models for the objects that move around the mech. After some discussion, we landed on making a radiation barrel, a futuristic crate, and a beach ball (for some added light-heartedness).

All models were modeled in Maya, then textured in Substance Painter. All I had to do in Unity was apply the models and textures to the already made prefabs.

After that, I started on creating the main menu screen. This included making a logo, so I spent some time doing that. Currently, the main menu is in a very rough blockout, and will be finished next week.

Radioactive Waste Barrel

Futuristic Crate

Beach Ball!

I also worked on creating the sell presentation, which included drawing little characters of the engineers :)

Week 9 - Creating Interior Kit

This week, I made an interior kit for the level designers to use. It consisted of a spiral staircase, a regular staircase, a U-shaped platform, a regular platform and a door. I also made walls for the mech arms and core. All of these things I textured in Substance Painter.

Worked on the sell presentation, figured out grades with Aiden, and tweaked some of the level designs after the fact. Spent lots of time figuring out a plan for the remainder of the quarter, figuring out what to prioritize over other things. Also added the external city into the main scene, so it shows up when the player looks in the pilot view. Finally, I made an animated main menu screen that shows the controls for playertesters using Itch.io.

Also made a title screen/promo art :)

For next week, I want to keep modeling things for the interior to make it really feel like the inside of a giant mech. The plan right now is to make three different sized pipes, and a cage for the core. On top of that, I want to model something special for the grapple points, so they aren't just cylinders.

The plan is to talk to the teammates and figure out what they need done art wise the most.

Week 10 - Texture & Model Overhaul

For this week, I recreated all of the previous textures and turned them into pixel art. On top of that, I created new models to replace all the placeholders and too add some diversity to the interior of the mech. This included things like copper pipes, air ducts, and moving fans. Battery charger & plug-in have both been replaced with new models. I made an animation for the battery-plug in that grips the battery when it's charged.

Also made a first-pass trailer with what was in the game :)

Industrial Fan

Battery Charger

Week 11 - Final Changes

This week, I spent a lot of my time polishing certain aspects of the game. This included making final models like the car model, beachball box, safe space model, rubble model, and the model for the sign. I spent a lot of my week polishing things where I could art wise. I made new canvases for the win/loss screens, fixed the pause screen and moving cameras, textured the basin, made custom sprites for particle effects, and remade the death screen UI. I also changed all the text on the walls and gave the signs geometry to sit on so they weren't just canvases floating in space.

The end of the week got spent on making the final production materials. I made a brand new trailer with the new game assets, readied the sell presentation one last time, and added needed content to the asset template.

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