ESCAPE - Cosmic Horror - Andreas

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

First intention was to create a diorama with astronauts fending off monsters chasing them in a star-ship interior with old-school graphics, but it might turn into something more experimental, perhaps even a still-mockup for a game.

More to come soon.

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

Did some testing with lightmaps. I wonder if I can make it feel dark and gritty while still maintaining some cartoony pixelness.

Up next though it's time to give the characters some attention.

Jalcober · Apr 2013

Love it!

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

Thanks,

Working on the astronaut. Started off more painterly but it got messy fast so I'm heading for the same clean pixel style as the architecture.

Got started with texturing the monster(s) as well. Going painterly on those which seems to work pretty well due to their organic nature.

Need to come up with some new rooms. Was thinking of making something sequential to present the astronauts attempt to escape.

duncan · Apr 2013

I LOVE this!. Really great style with a little room to move. I am really surprised there are not more entries like this.

Makes me wish I started down a similar path........ maybe it is not too late.

Awesome work so far I will keep an eye on this for sure.

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

Wow, thanks. Initially I choose this path so I could pull off each element relatively easily, the focus of the project being on the style, both artistically and technically. As I get further into it though it represents some interesting challenges.

Been working more on the astronaut but I figured I'd show the start on the fish-monster/alien. Getting pretty painterly on this one which might clash with the established style. Perhaps I can compensate by going with bolder strokes, or building it up with simpler gradations.

Saman · Apr 2013

oh, nice. I love to see different styles in competitions and this one looks unique and good at the same time. Looking forward to seeing the progress on this one.

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

Glad to hear, and more progress you'll see. More on the astronaut. Need to get those weapons started.

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

Ditched the fishes and made another type of alien, inspired by the insect-crab-like fungoids from Yuggoth. Texturing in progress. Need to rig the thing as well.

More pixelpushing on the astronaut. Don't know how noticeable it is but I'm trying to avoid drawing angles on the texture as much as possible to keep things from getting washed out through antialiasing. Instead I stretch out the uv's to my favor.

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

So I've been spending most of the time redoing and figuring out the environment the "story" will take place in. I'm not entirely set on format yet but it's going to be about the astronauts (A1 and A2) making their way to an escape-pod while fending off the fish creatures chasing them.
And by fish creatures means I changed my mind about replacing them. The insectoid alien thing I had come up with wasn't working, particularly in posing. The fish creatures are a lot more fun and their humanoid structure lends more to recognizable expressiveness.

Everything is quite messy as I work all over the place but I don't like working in a vacuum so It was time to show the progress so far. I feel I'm starting to figure out the style I was going for. Still thinking about different ways to involve lighting but I'm keeping it not shaded for the time being.

conte · Apr 2013

System · Apr 2013

Really love the style of this one! A nice reference for fish-people would be the game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the Innsmouth level. It's based on H. P. Lovecraft stories, it's very dated now but you'll get a nice feel for it.

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

Thanks. Good to see it's likable even at this rough stage.

For the environment I've set to only use one 256x256 map and since there's not any noise and few patterns I can stretch uv's like crazy thus creating varying shapes and sizes of the same components. A bit costly on the polys though so might make bigger components on the map later as I got quite a lot of space left.

AimBiZ · Apr 2013

Just testing poses and stuff. Trying to get an estimate of how manageable some things would be to do for the presentation.

The current way I have my texture atlas laid out has resultet in some pretty un-optimized mesh construction. Next thing will be to improve that, a lot.

duncan · Apr 2013

This is looking pretty killer. I really dig the style. You may have mentioned it earlier but are you still planing to light map this? coz I am pretty keen to see some of that action. :thumbup:

d1ver · May 2013

Love the style man. This is looking really great

I second lightmapping!

AimBiZ · May 2013

Appreciate the positive feedback. Indeed it was time to do something about the lighting.

Just a quick update. Light maps didn't work out style-wise but after reading Simon Schriebt's blog post about volumetric glow in Doom 3 I got inspired to try with vertex coloring.
So far I'm liking how it's turning out. I also optimized things down quite a bit and rearranged the atlas map.
I'm thinking of going back to present the enviro in a cut-through style. At least I'm liking it more seen from a distance.

scrawld · May 2013

I love the style. I'm not sure how you did the shadows, but they work really well!

AimBiZ · May 2013

The cast shadows are simply vertex colored meshes multiplied with the environment through a shader. Same goes for the glow but added instead. The scene is rendered in Unity.

Getting the grips on ShaderLab, unity's own shader language. Getting closer to what I have in mind. The cast shadow on the characters are just projectors. The shadow map is too hires so need to come up with an alternative.

chaosblade · May 2013

Really cool style. Like the ways you pulled off the env shadows.

lonelysquare · May 2013

This is awesome, I love it. That tiny texture map is going a long way. Keep it up.

AimBiZ · May 2013

Appreciated!

This is how I'll present the scene, as a cut-through diorama, which was my first intention when starting this project.
Now I just got to figure out the action taking place.

AimBiZ · May 2013

More changes and things are starting to actually come together, at least something that's presentable. Still thinking about how to shade the characters. Just going for unlit is the only thing that's been working so far but they loose sense of form on some places.

AimBiZ · May 2013

This will be my submission. Wish I could have done more but it's time to move on. It's been a pretty interesting experience and I'm thinking of revisiting this style in the future and do more prototypes, finding a good way to build the environments that makes the most out of vertex painting with minimum polycount and not to mention how the characters should be lit.
Now though I'm itching to make something more gritty and less pixelated!

kenruze · May 2013

This is great; I love it!

FirstKeeper · May 2013

Delicious!

fei-rukawa · May 2013

I love this entry!!

SaferDan · May 2013

Oh wow! I love this so much! New background wallpaper for sure!

BubblegumTate · May 2013

Awesome style. Love it.

JessCooper · May 2013

This is such a great entry. I love the style I am inspired to try it out myself

ParoXum · May 2013

Awesome style

Inspirational for me, thanks.

Lilith · May 2013

Awesome, I would buy this game right now

cupsster · May 2013

DAT PIXEL o_O

cupsster · May 2013

but please, for sure cut inside of shadows. modern and recent past era mobile devices are powerful enough to cope with pretty high vertex counts with simple shaders and minimal overdraw

rollin · May 2013

supersupernice!

JauntyTunes · May 2013

A-friggin-mazing!

AimBiZ · May 2013

Thanks a bunch people!

@cupsster: Thanks for the heads up. Strangely enough it didn't occur to me to research what that kind of hardware is capable of, but if I'd ever make a prototype of this that would probably be the target platform.