✨Jump headfirst into a wild cat chase under the stars!✨
≽^•⩊•^≼
With your friends, play as either:
A speck of light running from the fate of being extinguished
OR
The playful cats chasing after it.
🐾Core Team🐾
Amanda Hui | Character Art
Mai Linh Au | Environment Art
Lulu Ross-Bouquet | Character & Prop Art
Kaveesha Amarasinghe | Rigging
🐾Freelancers🐾
Hannah Millerchip | Animation
Gemma Atkinson | Prop Modelling
Aaliyah Medina Sodey | Prop Modelling
Ziqing Gong | Prop Modelling
Robbie Coleman | Blueprints
There’s something about the night air that really brings the light to life… literally! And you’d best believe these little kitties are eager to get their claws on them!
ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ
Pounce! is a fast-paced action multiplayer party game that seeks to put a twist on the familiar cat's game of laser chase.
We aim to produce a short playable demo of this concept within the next few months ready for our university submission deadline at the start of May. This demo will introduce the players to the core mechanics of the game within a round and establish the intended mood and style.
Our core team members have been spending time on concept art alongside their chosen specialisms to fully define our direction before we get really stuck into production, so we're very excited to fully bring our ideas to life soon!
The following posts showcase our concepts and greyboxing progress as of this original post - feedback is much appreciated so we can help this project succeed the best it can!
(Third-party assets featured in the prototype GIF above:
Cats - Simple
Cute Bird 2)
Replies
plus some prop concepts (lamps: Kaveesha; tables: Lulu)
For our demo we plan on having 2 variants of each character available to demonstrate the unique abilities of each one. For example, the axolotl light creature may have an ability allowing it to become invisible for a few seconds, while the fish light creature can spawn bubbles to trap cats temporarily.
(#1: Kaveesha; #2 & #5: Amanda; #3 & #4: Lulu)
The movement blueprint for the cat as well as the lighting for the scene are very much still a WIP - the cat placeholder we're using is currently substituted into the default Unreal third-person character BP and has had little changes besides some modifying of some movement parameters, so we're working on researching how to implement better locomotion that suits the character better. As for the lighting, things will hopefully become clearer once we define lamp placements since temporary light "safe zones" for the light creature players are a planned mechanic in the game, but there are definitely some areas that are still too dark that I need to touch up. Any feedback or thoughts are appreciated as always
Cat Sculpt
"Base shape is done but now trying to figure out how to sculpt in the fur (it's a bit messy on the front right now, still a work in progress), and to add a mouth cavity, would appreciate any feedback and suggestions."
(The mouth cavity has since been blocked in)
"Been working on the rig for our cute cat using the base mesh, in its current state the joints are placed and oriented, used a basic IK handle to see if the joints bend in the correct way. Would appreciate some feedback on this if possible. "
We plan to do a full sculpted cat for now - I forgot to attach the stylisation references we've been looking at for it, but something like a combination of these:
Links: #1 , #2 and #3
We're going for a semi-realistic sort of hand-painted style for the game, still working on finding some concrete games and ideas to use as benchmark style reference but some that we've considered have been Animal Crossing: New Horizons, this Rookies project and Stray/Baldur's Gate 3 for colour and foliage.
it would probably be faster to make the models too and texturing might look cleaner.
Just my opinion though!
I definitely plan on researching stylised shaders for our game because as you said we don't want anything to look too plasticky :") I don't know if we'll go for completely flat colours or a cel-shaded look like that first reference, but perhaps something close to it that still preserves any details we want on stuff!
The trunks aren't level right now so I need to check how that fits in engine and work out whether that was intentional blocking out on my part or if something got lost in translation haha
I'll add more to the texture at some point but we're trying to get as much done for alpha submission ATM so I want to get a rough textured version of the tree done ASAP
I've cut the pieces up in Maya but I'm not sure which way I've done them would be more optimal, I see most people do basic rectangular cards despite the remaining transparent pixels but I'm also aware it's important to make the shape of the card as close to the shape of the leaf/etc. as possible. So I guess what I'm asking is how far do I go with sticking to the shapes of the branches and leaves I've made?
Version B (lower poly rectangular cards encompassing the general form):
I've made a playlist compiling all of our team's uploaded progress clips on my channel which you can view here:
Here are the new clips I wanted to share! First is a prototype multiplayer system made by our Blueprints freelancer, Robbie:
And here is some updated progress on the cat rig in action by Kaveesha
Other benefits to having the foliage in a flat rectangle:
- Smoother deformations - useful if you're adding wind effects
- No need to completely rework the shape if you change the underlying textures
- Lower tri count makes it easier to work with when creating full assets
- Less likely to have any shading errors when the engine triangulates
I got some feedback elsewhere that suggested I cut the cards into tris entirely to optimise the tri count as much as possible, so this is what I'm currently working with:
I also plan on redrawing the pink flower branch on the left so that the different parts of it aren't overlapping as this might affect how the cards look when a wind sim is later applied. (Even though it's an indoor level we figured there should at least be a small bit of movement on the foliage lol, especially when players brush past them)
Shaping these in Maya to make clusters to import into Unreal hasn't been too hard so far even if the unevenness of the shapes irks me a little :") Here's a test run of the main leaf card I made on our tree for our alpha submission, added in with Unreal's foliage mode:
My workflow may change a little once I familiarise myself with SpeedTree and adapt my current process to its tools, but I feel a little more confident now that I'm starting to grasp and successfully execute the basics of foliage in engine
Given the nature of these structures I've just ZRemeshed them for now for the low poly models but I'll go through and organise the UVs myself properly, I plan for these main tree trunks to have their own unique texture while the other modular parts of the cat tree such as some of the platforms and supporting pillars I thiiiink I can get to work with a wood trim sheet (+ leafy thing for some platforms) or if not at least some kind of shared texture atlas.
I'm not actually sure of how to go about UVing a model like this though :"D for the previous version I let Substance Painter auto UV the models when I quickly textured them and things looked fine but I'm not sure if this is bad practice lol. Auto UVing in Maya just gave awful results so I'm definitely not doing that. Would appreciate any useful insights!
References:
Lorenzo Lanfranconi
Thais Del Rey
A good guideline is to not do any work unless you can clearly explain what problem that it solves.
Another good rule is to always do things the simplest way that you can and only do it more complicated if there is a compelling reason to do so.
When you are making a game the bottleneck is always going to be time. Peoples work cost money and every minute somebody is working, that is cutting away from potential profits. If you cannot explain clearly why the work you are doing is going to help in the long run, it is probably not worth doing (or at least not until you back up and figure out exactly why the work is important to do)
So with that in mind, what do we gain by manually retopo the tree? Is it going to give us a time savings? Will it increase quality in a way that makes a strong emotional impact for the player? If you cannot give a definitive answer to questions like that, then I would recommend to go for something faster and simpler. You could do an auto-retopo and an autowrap and then bake the hi to the new low. Whole thing can be ready to go in 20 minutes like that.
This is quick and dirty and will not give you the absolute best result. However, it will probably give you a perfectly good result quickly and then you can continue moving more quickly to get other things done.
Once the entire project is all ready and you've tested it and everybody is feeling good about what's there, then if there is time to perfect things with the art you can go hog wild with it. But chances are good that many things will change between now and then, so taking additional time to optimize art assets could end up being a waste.
Dont fall for the common fallacy that if you do things in a more difficult or laborious way, that will mean it has more value. Working from assumptions - even if you mean well and are doing your very best - can make you a liability more than an asset. And doing things strategically - even if it means doing "sloppy" work at certain points in the project - does not mean you are lazy. It's a matter of prioritizing task so that you answer the most important questions in the project as quick as possible, minimize labor lost due to future changes, and push things that depends on others as far back as possible.
note that there are plenty of good reasons to manually retopo and uv the tree, of course. It is just a question about when is the right time to do that. Getting to finish line a month early with a good looking game is better than showing up late with a halfway perfect game.
I completely agree with your closing statement, our priority right now is having a presentable slice of the game for our next deadline in a couple weeks to really sell the visual style and gameplay in a more complete state than our alpha submission, so I'm going to focus on polishing my texture and foliage work as much as possible and sweat stuff like proper optimisation later. I was definitely very hung up and stressed over doing the process the "right way", but you've given me some really useful insight from a different perspective I never thought to look through! I feel much more reassured with what I'm doing now.
As I'm writing this I've just baked the high poly of one of the trunks onto the ZRemeshed low poly that's been auto-UV'd in Substance and it looks more than good enough for now even if the technical aspects are probably sub-optimal. I'll update later today with the new polished texture work
Today I worked on practising and getting used to how the program works some more and modelling out some high-poly branches to use for the cat tree as an atlas. I'm following the Tree Production Using Speedtree section of Dekogon Studio's Environment Production course on ArtStation Learning for guidance and it's been super helpful!
ATM I'm concerned the branch/cluster at the bottom is a bit big for a card, I need to plan out some more how I'll actually use it. The top branch will be a smaller branch for the flowers only, likely as a section of a bigger leafy branch.
I'm concentrating on having as much complete-looking foliage assets for our beta deadline as possible, so the texture atlas I drew from before hasn't been updated or refined, but I'll work on that soon.
The branches here will also be coloured on the wood to match the textures I've thrown onto the tree trunks so far:
There are a few obvious artefacts in the texture due to the UVs being done automatically by Substance Painter but these work well for our current situation!
Firstly, my first pass at hand-painted detail on the secondary trunk for the cat tree. I like this one more than the main trunk painting because I made more of a conscious effort to give it some wood-like detail.
Secondly, my first go at making a tiling texture for this project - super rough sculpt of some Georgian floor tiles I baked and painted in Substance. The texture looks too white and new at the moment so I plan on adding some wear and more damage on my next pass, but I wanted a rough idea of the flooring materials for our beta deadline. Texture resolution is 2k for now.
Finally, our beta progress update video (which also functions as a rough first pass of a trailer)! Most of our assets are still a WIP, main focus now is getting everything textured to a high standard with a consistent style and just really pulling the scene together as we have just over a month left to work on this project now. On my end I'll be concentrating on producing some really nice stylised foliage to populate not just the tree but also the rest of the greenhouse, and stepping in to assist with other parts of the level where necessary as well as level layout.
I wanted to give an update on the rigging process on here for more people to see, much appreciated for omaii for posting and updating about the project
The rig has the basic ik fk joints, though I experimented with using ik ribbon spline on the tail for more free movement, im quite happy with how its come out so far since its my first ever quadruped rig!
I had time to paint and roughly model some hanging foliage we plan to have dangling from the ceiling platforms and hanging in the walkway under the top floor too. I forgot to shade some of the huge leafy branch canopy so I'll go over that later but I wanted to try and test out how these would look in Maya. Modelling plants in Maya feels so much more tedious now that I've become accustomed to SpeedTree though LOL
I also tidied up the high-poly branches I modelled for the big cat tree trunks before, reduced overlapping on the leaves freehand to get the exact sort of looks I wanted instead of wrestling with the generation settings haha. I need to go back in tomorrow and add anchor points to my branch cutouts to build some more interesting branch structures - also trying to keep in mind the trunks will both be topped off with leafy platforms so I can't quite model them completely akin to normal trees - looks very cardy at the moment but I am excited to bring everything together for this asset now
Although we ended up cutting a few corners on gameplay development to focus on refining the visuals for our cinematics and overall look, we're planning to continue working on the project (after a small break, of course ^^") to polish it for submission to the Rookies and also to work on as a fun side project in general
Here's my updated version of the floor tiles!
Bake:
Base colour painting
Cleaned things up by hard modelling a base for the diamonds and bevelled square tiles before sculpting some variations of them in ZBrush and then arranging them onto the plane like so. Also threw another plane in as part of the texture to show the grout between the tiles since before the tiles were sandwiched too closely together lol
I added a little bit of roughness variation as well.
Replaced the old texture in engine, much happier with this version now
Dipping my toes in Substance Designer to generate the rest of the tiling textures I need a little more quickly - now that I'm starting to get the hang of how it works it feels a little less scary x) This is a texture for some vent tiles I want to add to the floor to break up the repetition a bit. I'll turn the material into a set of tiles similar to the floor tiles so that the individual tiles on the texture have some variation rather than repeating the same single tile everywhere.
https://www.therookies.co/entries/33524
Also attaching our updated trailer for this submission ^^