Shady Dealings has been my most complete, comprehensive, challenging, and successful project to date. As one of four IGM (Interactive Games and Media) graduate students at RIT who decided to pursue a mobile game project for their graduate capstone project, I certainly had my work cut out for me as an artist, art director, project manager, pipeline engineer, and level builder while the other members of the team focused almost entirely on game and engine programming.
Level Design & Construction
Wanting to save as much space and time as possible, I pushed a modular level construction scheme which was embraced throughout the game's development. Each part of the environment was broken up into several permutations that could be linked together cleanly and appear as one structure. Shown below are several examples of final constructed levels released in the current iOS title.
Concept Art
During the initial design phase, character aesthetic would be a topic of much deliberation, as the team did not want the characters to seem overly comical or overly gritty -- two common qualities of game character design. The final character aesthetic landed somewhere between Legend of Zelda and Disney cartoons.
Pipeline Tools
In order to effectively move content from the production space to the game project, some scripting was necessarily to streamline processes that sometimes would involve several hundred assets at one time. Below are two scripts that I spearheaded to expedite I/O processes for 3D art assets and game level assets.
The first script, BatchFBXExport.MEL, is a Maya script that parses an entire scene and exports individual objects in their own FBX file -- somewhat important for our art pipeline. Without this script, there was no way to export an entire scene without storing all of it in one FBX.
The second script, SceneExporter.cs, was a Unity Editor script that would allow levels to be built in Unity and exported directly from the editor in XML format. The XML would then be cleanly imported to the engine at runtime.
The first script, BatchFBXExport.MEL, is a Maya script that parses an entire scene and exports individual objects in their own FBX file -- somewhat important for our art pipeline. Without this script, there was no way to export an entire scene without storing all of it in one FBX.
The second script, SceneExporter.cs, was a Unity Editor script that would allow levels to be built in Unity and exported directly from the editor in XML format. The XML would then be cleanly imported to the engine at runtime.