Hello everyone! I’m very late to the party!!! But I’m here and not dead!!!
There are A LOT of things to cover which are not in other previous milestones (I am really sorry) due to…this pandemic infecting my family (we all got it, everyone has recovered thankfully – I am not joking about this either, Covid is very serious).
Anyways, welcome to the final build (Alpha v0.0001) for the game ‘Cold Sun’
Concept and Lore
Cold Sun is a rouge-like, survival game where the Sun suddenly shrunk and compressed into a red star. During this time period, the temperature of Earth slowly began to drop and communities began to collapse. Only until a superpower energy crystal known as REIC began to appear. Offering great power in exchange to a life-time long disease, people became desperate for anything to stay warm and alive.
You, as the main character, almost died during a heavy blizzard. In order to survive, you reluctantly grab hold of your REIC injector and used it for the first time. Although you have gained power, you only have a short amount of time before the crystal energy destroys your body. In an effort to find a way to separate yourself from the dependence of REIC, you traveled the lands of the frozen Earth to search for a cure.
If you wanted to know the inspiration behind the lore, it came from a video describing what would happen if the sun disappeared. With the power of anime logic, I spun it around with a little bit of physics (A star can collapse or expand before its death or before becoming a neutron star/a supernova).
VERY ironically, and very recently, Kurzgesagt released a video pretty much explaining this concept! Still made my original idea first 🙂 !
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q
Showing some stuff I didn’t before
Lets start of with the main playable character! I do not have an actual good name for her because I would have to think of one that is related to the lore in some way, but for now let’s just call her Yukihime (雪姫) also worded as “Snow Princess”
I actually…don’t have any concept sketches besides loosely referring to a couple of actual winter clothing. Texturing was mainly put into a mostly dominant single shaded color. In the styles I wanted to replicate, it was a grand mistake to do it without setting up a cel-shader for Substance. The problem was I wanted to do two toned coloring (that is, create my own hard and soft shadows onto the models which are generally static). This is to achieve the “anime” look, and it will work really well in practice. Unfortunately, this meant also spending more time on Yuki so its not feasible for me to try to learn this ON top of modeling and texturing.
You may also see that there’s some red glowing emissive textures. Woah!
Seems there’s a sign of infection for our female protagonist.
There are no cybernetics, but I really didn’t have time to add more detailing (plus I modelling in a way that you can swap clothes and also equipment)
No weapons unfortunately, this would also eat up too much time in a such a rush.
THE FINAL PROJECT BUILD
Now then, onto..the final build of the game (version 0.0001 lol).
Let’s first talk about the level.
Here we can see two main parts, Sensoji’s Pagoda and the crystal cavern. You may recall in the original concept that the crystal “REIC” is the only thing that is keeping the remaining people on Earth alive without dying to the now very cold temperatures. Originally, my level design had two parts, a large evil bad guy building, this pagoda, and an ENTIRE city with it (plus a frozen). And due to heavy time restrictions, a lot of this was cut out. I compensated to add snow mountains instead (to show how snow has just continued to build) and at least show that some how a religious symbol has managed to survive while many modernized buildings may not (that was intended but you don’t see any buildings).
So its safe to conclude this would have been a “Safe Haven” if I begun to develop this part of the level more.
The lighting of the sky is an obvious reference to what the sky may look like once the sun started to shrink into a Red star (although I think I might have gotten this physics logic wrong but hey its anime logic C: ).
Dark sky in reference to the very obvious lack of sunlight reaching earth, and a really small red sun. I originally wanted a red kind of ambience, but I found out just mixing the bluish exterior of the REIC crystals and the red/orange glow created a really calm setting, further enforcing this to be a special haven. There was an option to do post processing to create a harder red (I tried) but it ended up washing too much of the area’s colors (and its potential environmental story telling).
So while this may be a post apocalyptic setting, there will always be pockets of safe places where people will try their best to survive.
Reflections
First of all, let me just say this was a wildddddddddddddddddddddd ride for me. From my original concept to the story I wanted to build, it was VERY ambitious. I think what I’ve learned most about this class is that these ideas need time. It needs to build slowly into the vision you pictured way back when you first pitched. For me, I felt I’ve grown a lot.
As an artist, this was my real first time going into texturing, lighting, and modeling. I have had experience and now it’s been all tied together nicely.
Modeling – Modeling was probably the biggest improvement for me. I had a lot of fun creating my character and assets (though I think I’ll prefer some other software beside Maya. Zbrush is fine). Additionally, I am in 3D modelling 2 this term so really big shout outs to both Prof. Josh and Ralph for teaching these concepts (and having videos up which I often referred to BOTH lectures to get it to work). Literally going back and forth to understand how to create assets, texture, and export them into the game that does not break was a lot to take in. The learning curve was tremendously high for me, but I felt focusing on some new skills was very rewarding. Definitely feeling future vibes to go have more fun modelling more characters especially!
Lighting, Unity Experience, Environmental Building – This was a lot of fun as well. I always liked to nerd about cool lighting and I think I did an okay job at it here. I much prefer Unreal for lighting. And building this really nice level (although pretty stripped) was pleasant too. Modular building is a definite way to go.
I would say the most struggles had to come from Unity, which is my first time using and it is similar to Unreal…but it has it’s weird quirks too. I would say that with my lack of and hatred of programming has caused me to feel really disappointed on how I can’t even implement decent controls or a camera. I was mostly playing a hard catch up so this was really difficult for me to comprehend. At least by touching Unity, I will not feel like a complete idiot using it.
Technical Rigging and Animation – Oh boy! My strong suit! Which I just did not utilize at all. REALLY a big shame because after I learned how difficult it was to set up animation in Unity was just too much to do in a very small amount of time (a whole week when I reached to this point). Honestly, all I have currently is a couple of Mixamo animations. An idle, a walk, and a run. Also are not skinned professionally. Really disappointing..I wanted to animate some fighting animations. But a simplistic rig is not going to cut it for me to animate something nice like I usually am doing, so that was skipped for this project in exchange for modeling. In addition, learning how complicated it was to try to add attacks was just not pleasant. Still, the decision to learn something fresh is something I do not regret (and now having another character I can rig her and animate her in peace over the break!)
Ending Statements
Overall, this project was pretty heavy for me. I have never done something like this and definately have noticed how bad it can get when you need to crunch. I may have been fairly inexperienced with parts of the pipeline I had no idea how to approach it, but I’ve grown so much over this course. It was truly a great experience to understanding the art pipeline and how much more experience I need to become a technical artist in the future!
Below is a link to the builds
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VCPB9jM–j_lbK3Q8Klk2n8vStg2i5gT?usp=sharing
Finally, a very special thank you to Angel Gabriel Barrozo for his REALLY GOOD soundtrack for my level named “In Cold Blood”
https://vjmedia.wpi.edu/Video_Game_Music_Collaboration_2020
Seriously, gives me a very nice vibe for what a future rouge-like game should have for an OST.
That is all folks! I’m sorry for missing all the milestones and just struggling myself to death. And for disappearing on everyone. But when life throws you punches, you just need to suck it up and move forward.
Look forward to any future developments to this game, its lore, and the story of our protagonist.