Team Robo-Kraken

Team Robo-Kraken consists of four members: Jason Lynch, Dylan Reilly, Eoghan Maguire, and I.
Each of us fulfill different roles as part of this project, but also work in tandem with one another with the goal to make "The Thinking City" a successful final year project.
More information about the team can be accessed via our Team Mahara page - listed here.

"The Thinking City"

The Thinking City is a game birthed from a series of pitches done within the team, the originator being Jason Lynch. From here the concept evolved as the entire team began to work with it.

The Thinking City is designed to be a vertical slice of a conceptually larger single player game, intended to reflect the small scoped game demos distributed up to and during the 2000s. You play as a silent protagonist who enters the secret underground city after receiving a mysterious invitation. On arrival, you find that the entire technological paradise has been abandoned, with no signs of life. You are greeted by an A.I. character named T.R.I.S.H. who guides you on a journey to figure out the mystery of its downfall, and to restore prosperity to the now desolate underground metropolis. The game is primarily focused on delivering tone and atmosphere in its environment, as well as storytelling in its non-player character dialogue and environmental detail.

The virtual slice intended to be developed for this project sees the player during a section of game in which they have been trapped in a lab environment, patrolled by seemingly possessed Service Robots that become alarmed to any noticeable movement and sound. This part of the game takes place during the players excursion into the Science District - one of the 4 districts of the city. During this slice of gameplay the player will need to carefully and tactically explore the lab environment, with the goal to restore full power to the facility and open the door to escape.

The player shall have little in the ways of defending themselves. Instead, the player will need to manipulate the attention of their robot adversaries by throwing distractions (that the player has but a limited amount) and by moving carefully around the environment, hiding behind objects or escaping through constantly opening & closing malfunctioning doors.

Aesthetically, there are a number of games have influenced what we intend for the game's "look". Games such as Doom (2016), Bioshock, The map "Five" from Call of Duty: Black Ops, Portal 2, and Alien: Isolation among others have been heavily influential in terms of our core aesthetics & tone. We aim to create an unsettling, dilapidated, yet futuristic environment for the player to roam that enforces an implied narrative aspect of the game.

 This game is geared towards a rather specific sort of player - one who is represented by this persona that we designed:

A game trailer that I edited for this project can be seen below:

How are my roles relevant to the project you may ask? Well..

Lead Artist

The role of Artist is incredibly important in relation to this project thanks to its heavy emphasis on tone and atmosphere. For us to construct a convincing and suitable sense of the game, we need to be able to design characters and an environment that feel part of the same continuity / setting that reflect the narrative of the game, fulfill their intended purposes, and that are informed based on examples from within and outside of the game industry. To fulfill this role, I shall create art concepts and designs digitally, using a Wacom Intuos 5 drawing tablet and a fully licensed copy Clip Studio Paint.

Character Design, Modelling, & Texturing

For the non-player and player characters in the game to exist in the first place in a 3D context, they must be modeled using 3D modelling software. Without character models, our game would lose a massive portion of itself - that being the enemy robots that patrol the environment as well as the player's presence within the game (hand / arm model that does actions during animated sequences). I shall be creating all of these models as well as fully rigging them within Blender 2.8, a piece of software that I will adapt my 3DS Max knowledge to in order to make use of the new Blender update's improved functionality & usability.

For each of these models that I create, it will be necessary for them to be textured and presented in a way that fits them into the general aesthetic of the game's environment, as well as communicate the character's attributes. To create textures and materials and also apply them onto any characters and /or objects I make, I shall be availing of Allegorithmic's Substance Painter - on a student license.

Character Animation

Characters in games need animation to communicate a number of things. Their personality, their function, as well as their condition and context within a game's world. Animations pull the player into a given character and their actions a sense of believably, invoking an emotional response that reflects a character's intended design specifications & purpose. Without animations, it is very possible that the game would seem flat and lose any and all of its intended impact. Animations will be created in Blender's animation workflow, then brought over to Unity for splicing, testing, & implementation into its animation state machine system.

VR Lead

After a certain point, we decided to re-gear our game concept towards being a VR game. As a result of this, I took up the mantle of VR Lead. It is important for us to have a member in this specific role as none of us had been familiar with VR prior, and there are many pitfalls that one can fall into when developing without reference - e.g. motion sickness, immersion breaking interactions, etc. In this role, I would experiment and design different interactions for our game in VR, researching best practices in order to avoid creating an unpleasant experience, as well as learning more about how VR works in Unity.

Over the course of this project there are a number of things I wish to accomplish and put further work into, whether through research or practice.

Generally, I wish to improve my artistic ability - specifically in the field of character design through the robot characters present in our game project, but also attempt to create environment art that communicates the game's setting, aesthetic, mood, and atmosphere. I shall be putting effort into researching lighting & light properties, environmental composition, and how to elicit an emotional response from the player through the game's presentation.

Additionally, I wish to learn how to properly model and rig characters to a production standard for use in the Unity engine. There are a number to aspects of this that I wish learn more about and implement into the game's character models - namely: UV mapping, Texturing, Rigs (focusing on bone weights and kinematics), as well as how to make use of Unity's animation state machines. I will also be working with Unity's lighting & shader system.

I will be putting time into researching how these things are done currently in industry, as well as following a number of courses when learning how to make use of unfamiliar software. Any and all resources & references I use during the project will be available via the 'References & Resources' section of this Mahara page.

In order to lay out a foundation for how the game should look, I created a number of designs for characters and environmental objects, as well as explorations of the setting's mood and lighting.

I have outlined my process to create, and the importance of both the Service Bot designs, Protagonist design, and Foyer environment art here.

Over the course of this project, I learned about Root Motion in character animation and applied this principle to our G.S.A. Tainted Robot character's animations.

I will go through the process I took to make use of this technique in animating my robot character, the problems I faced, and how I imported them into unity - here.