Nooks 'n crannies
Can you find them all?
Nooks and crannies – GGJ21
Description:
You find yourself in a decrepit church, overtaken by roots and plats. You are lonely. However, the church is full of friendly woodland critters. They too must be lonely. Find the friendly animals so you can get yourself a comfortable nights’ sleep.
Role during project – Level Design/Environment Art/Creature Models
Level design/Blockout:
The level was built with alternative routes in mind. The intention was to reward the player for following clear visual cues (such as beams of light or skewed tables).
In order to complete the game, the player only needs to find 3 animals. The alternative route is the for players who don’t pick up on environmental clues being led astray by red herrings and only finding the most obvious critters.
A 3rd route could be added, in which the player explores every nook and cranny, disregarding visual clues.
Final blockout, ready for beautiful game art.
Props and texturing
In order to create a unified and polished-looking style, we decided on a style consisting of flat colors and gradients.
To achieve this, I made a master texture that was to be used for every prop and creature within the game. This texture was divided into the categories ‘Manmade’, ‘Diffuse’ and ‘Emissive’.
The Diffuse and Emissive categories were to be used for animals, grass, mushrooms, trees and similar organic models.
The manmade portion was to be used for the church and it’s contents.
We also included a ‘Space for other colors’, to be filled in if we felt like we needed other colors somewhere down the line.
This texture method has the added effect of being performance friendly.
The UV’s of animals and organic assets were stretched vertically to achieve a gradient.
Textured similarly to the animals, these plant cards were made to fill up the scene cheaply and give it life.
While mostly flat, the blue moss and ivy got curved planes so they could be placed on pillars or similar.
Whereas UV’s for the manmade assets were shrunk down to give them a flat color – with a large array of light or dark browns to choose from.
When these assets were combined with beautiful Post Processing, lighting and particles (credit for these go to Josien Vos), this made for a strong, unified color scheme and a strong atmosphere.
Thank you for checking out the process behind Nooks ‘n Crannies’ level design and the texturing and modelling behind its environment.
