Thread by @BLonqueu

Hello everybody, today i'll be posting a thread on the creative process of our latest game. This thread will contain spoilers so if you haven't play the game yet i suggest you do it first.

thisisbapts.itch.io/victor-and-the…

#indiedevhour #gamedev #IndieGameDev

First, I'd like to mention that the game was made during a game jam that lasted 4 days. This is the reason why the workflow can look a bit messy ; we had absolutely no time and had to create an entire universe, with a story, props, characters and textures, in only four days.

First we randomly picked a theme between these, it was a rather open theme so we had to narrow our ideas down, we made a mind map and ended up with a specific type of game based on riddles. From there @Nescience_1 came up with a story and we started working.

@Nescience_1 ideas were quite abstract at first, so @Louna took care of rewriting the story he invented. Then he managed to explain the game mechanisms he was thinking of on paper: here's a glimpse of what he would give us as instructions for map arrangements or riddles.

@Louna and I had to come up with a specific artistic direction that would stand out. We tought of strange univers such as Tim burton's, bendy and the ink machine, don't starve and even professor layton!

From there we started to imagine what our universe would look like, here are some (really quick) character sketches from Louna and a little story board for the intro of the game, here's also the kind of palettes we had to stick to.

The modelisation had to be really simple because we had no time to unwrap nor to bake/optimise: there were a lot of assets to modelize, texture and integrate (around 65). Less faces means less details but it also means faster work. We expected a lot from the textures as well.

The textures were fully handpainted in #substancepainter. They were all made following the color code of the palets and the art direction we took. They also had to be light so it would not surcharged with heavy image files, but they still had to remain unique and original.

As for the characters, they were modeled the same way as the props, but for a reading issue we had to triangulate them before integrating them into unity : the textures were wavy otherwise.

For the rig, I made a really rapid armature for each of the characters and automatic weight them to the meshes. (a bit gettho there i'll admit).

The integration was made progressivly. The longest part was creating a material for each meshes (no time to pack textures). The materials were specific to each object because we used an outline based on the pivot of the object. Each object had to have a specific outline size.

After dealing with everything we had to do in 3D, we got to the 2D art. Louna made a title logo and illustrations for the intro. Finally, I made a tutorial page and the credits.

Eventually i think what we saw the most during this game jam, were to do list, we had to produce a great amount of props and stuff, and to not forget them we used a lot of lists.