Post Mortem for Wave: A Rhapsody in Cantando

You are a jellyfish, an outsider to your tribe. Sunken ruins call to you with a haunting song. You alone wonder what could lie waiting in this place of music.

You cannot understand why others of your tribe cannot hear its need. You feel compelled to return it to its glory. Therefore you leave your tribe in search of the city that pulls your spirit. What awaits you, you can only imagine.

I was the 2D artist (among other roles within a four person team) for this ambitious, experience driven game project in Brian Winn's TC455 class.  This was my first opportunity to push the limits of what my 2D skills could accomplish in a 3D game engine.

Read more to find out my game art and design lessons from Version 1 of one of the most ambitious game projects I've tackled yet at Michigan State.  Better yet, play WaRiC!



Accomplishments

I can safely say, that during this project I was able to discover many of the ways that Unity can manipulate a tiling texture or sprite sheet in order to create a stimulating and beautiful 3D environment.

I created many original tileable textures by using a Photoshop/Illustrator/Unity workflow.  These textures included both organic tiles for use on terrains, as well as textures designed to augment the excellent 3D architecture creator by Justin Love.  I exploited several shaders, and Wayne Stiles even made us a specially designed shader to allow each building to "bloom" into color.  This required me to create multiple texture maps:  a grayscale, a color, and a normal map.

If you are careful in Unity, I found with some textures it is simple to create normal maps using the "convert from grayscale" box.  However, each normal map needed tweaked using this method and "bumpiness" had to be adjusted to the appropriate level.  What this allowed for our team was the creation of what seemed to be detailed masonry from textures alone.

Terrain textures were not nearly as awe inspiring, due to the lack of ability to use a normal map with Unity's terrain editor.  This required changes in size and Aniso levels in order to get the most bang for our buck with painting these textures.

Particle effects were a chance to really shine.  Justin has this great Grass Shader, that we experimented with for the game.  We found, for coral, it was best to take 2D sprites and use it as a "grass" within the Unity terrain editor.  However, the Grass Shader had an alternative benefit--creating simple, floating sea life.  This shader allowed us to plant sea horses, sea dragons, and other creatures in our game without creating additional models.  The elusive appearance and disappearance of particles using this shader worked well for sea life, as it made you wonder if the creature had in fact disappeared.  I am looking forward to adding more variety to this creatures in version 2.

Also, animated particles created this illusion of bio luminescence that was used to its full extent in the tutorial.  Having tiny animated Dino-flagellettes and jellyfish that were glowing in the scene added to calm and ambiance.

I also made swimming fish, but due to billboarding issues, we were unable to place it in version 1.  Expect to have some one-shot fish in version 2.

These were all exciting assets to make and see used in a 3D environment.

Lessons Learned


Due to the shear amount of assets generated, learning how to optimize textures was out of the question.  I discovered within 24 hours of delivery, how to create texture maps within Unity by using offsets that could have reduced our file size and load times in version one.   

This would have been incredibly effective for textures for the bloom shader, as I could have mapped both the grayscale and color textures onto one tile set as a power of two.  By using offsets, I could have adjusted the map for the bloom shaders.  Then, instead of loading 3 textures (bloom/grayscale normal map was already one texture) it would load 2.  

I could have also done a "terrain" map.  Once again, one texture map would have been loaded for the tiles, rather than 10 individual textures.  I plan to take this into action the next game.

I'm still looking forward to the opportunity to paint some UVs.  Version 2 will have painted UV Maps on main island buildings and puzzles.

In addition, although a great deal of time was spent on UI elements within the game, even more time could have been spent with narrative screens and the map.  In addition, shell menus were a little neglected, as we only received minor feedback on them during the playtest.  We focused our energy instead on details that were demanded by our players.  Polishing the UI is definitely something on deck for version 2, as I know I can clean up or add more interactivity to some of those elements.  

 


Special Thanks


Thanks to our killer team, Sandrine Do, Justin Love, and Wayne Stiles for their awesome work on this game.  In addition, thanks to Justin's friend Sean for amazing music, Jon Moore for sage Graphics Advise (he has his own game projects, so it is nice he took the time to give us some pointers), Brian Winn for instructional direction, and the TC455 class for essential play test feedback.