This post will cover the entirety of the work I completed for the Animation for Creative Industries’ vertical slice project. Over the course of the semester, I was assigned with “Group H” who were responsible for the game “Thalassophobia”, a game that revolves around a scuba diver navigating the deep sea in a submarine that is constantly taking on water and the player needs to perform tasks throughout the sub, while constantly draining the water with a pump before they drown. Along with having to deal with the challenges of the submarine, the player also needs to simultaneously travel to caves and collect treasure to meet the quota of the scuba diver’s contracted company. The game also utilized a 2.5D art style like Fallout Bunker and Paper Mario, that used 3D environments and 2D characters.
Character Animations.
Within this game project, I took responsibility primarily for the playable character’s design during the first assignment within this module and as a result, the first and possibly biggest responsibility I took up for the project was for the character animations. For this part of the project, I took a lot of experience I gained from the previous semester and used it here to create many of the animations present within the game, using the exact same method I used previously, where I traditionally drew out the key frames and then finished them and added the in-betweens digitally. The biggest priority I had when approaching the character animation was to ensure that the character movements weren’t just effective at conveying movement, but also quick and snappy to ensure they do not hamper with the quality of the character’s controls. I got a lot of my inspiration for these animations from multiple 2d plat-former games including Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros., Cuphead, Rayman and Kirby. I first completed the run cycle and idle animations. Once these were completed, we imported the frames into the Unreal file to get an idea of how the character would look in game and the results were extremely impressive. However, it did make it clear that more character animations were needed. So, I quickly got to work on the other animations including the jumping, climbing, sliding, swimming and drowning animations over the duration of the project’s development. Although I am mostly satisfied with the results of all the animations, the swim animation is noticeably weaker than the others. This is purely because I ended up making some of these animations much closer to the deadlines as I got caught up with other parts of the project, and thus did not have enough time to fully refine and improve the animations before the finalization of the project. The problem with the sequence is that it looked stiff in comparison to the other sequences due to the lack of torso movement. Furthermore, the legs were also slightly stiff and did not move like rubber hoses as stated within my art guides. I tried to fix this with some secondary actions, but I ended up having to adjust this animation constantly as I decided to add some bubbles as the secondary action, which worked okay for the upper torso, but the legs always looked off because the bubbles were constantly covering the legs and did not look like a secondary action. So, after some suggestions from my group, I adjusted the sequence at least 5 times before getting something both me and the group were satisfied with. I’m aware now in retrospect that this could have been avoided if I properly determined what animations where essential for game-play, which may have allowed me much more time to refine the swimming animation.
Initial inspiration and references.
character animation key frame sketches.
Finished character animation
Submarine Engine Room and Cave interior sets.
Around 3 weeks into the production, I was assigned to work on some of the environments within the game as me and my team collectively agreed that we needed to have more input into this aspect particularly. Me, Tiernan O’Donnell and Robert Taylor chose a room in the submarine we would work on, and I chose to do the engine room as I felt I had a good idea of what props and assets needed to be present within it. I first began by sketching up a design based on the layout of the sub created by the games design team and then started modelling the engine room based on the sketch. I was able to complete the first version quite quickly, however this was eventually rebuilt because I felt it did not match the style my teammates were building their rooms in, and my room did not follow the colour guidelines that had been set in place, so I took a colour guide Tiernan developed and would use it when I would start texturing the final model. Eventually after a few adjustments and implementations of some modular assets Robert created to ensure that all parts of the sub’s interior were consistent, I managed to get a design I was happy with and began texturing. This proved to be by far the most frustrating part of the entire process as I constantly ran into trouble with the UVs of the room and had to constantly go back and adjust the seams and then start texturing all over again and this cycle repeated several times before I got something that worked. Looking back This was purely because I did not pay enough attention to how I unwrapped my models and built some of the walls. This is due to the abnormal shape of the back wall, which led me to use the Boolean modifier constantly which greatly deformed the geometry of the walls creating edges which I constantly missed while trying to unwrap the model, and this led to the constant problems I had. Eventually after much trial and error, I finally managed to texture the room fully with no issue. However, then our lecturers advised that the engine room was too detailed which led me to go back and remove some props and details I felt were unnecessary and luckily due to the number of adjustments I made previously, I was able to finish the texturing quickly and move on with the other environment I would be assigned to. Along with the engine room, I took responsibility for the cave interior as well. I primarily used some of Tiernan’s concept art as a basis and began to develop the interior. The construction of this set was simple as a lot of the modelling consisted of me just positioning the vertices to create spikes as well as uneven terrain across the floor, walls, and ceiling. I would also run into difficulty with the textures of this model too, as the spikes caused some of the textures to distort due to some of the planes being stretched too much. This proved to be a big problem as in the concept art the cave gets its light from sources deep within the cavern and a lot of the light reflected on the spikes to act as the light source. I would try to add an emission modifier in Substance and draw on the highlights, but due to the geometry problems, I ran into constant difficulty with trying to get sharp line art for the spike highlights. I eventually came up with a compromise for this issue by creating a set of implied light sources in the form of some green gems. Although I did want to try and resolve the issue and get the final product to look like the visuals that were developed for the concept art, the time limit, and other parts of the project I was working on prevented me from fully resolving the original issue and having to use this compromise. Furthermore, The final submission version of the game does not have the same cave interior and engine room models as presented in this post, as I ran into difficulties when trying to commit all my finalized changes to GitHub and as a result the environments in the final submission do not match up with how I originally designed or altered both of these environment sets.
Engine room development
Concept art by Tiernan O’Donnell.
Cave interior development
Props I worked on.
While I was working on the engine room, I also thought about what props I could add as well as the turbine. Eventually, I settled on modelling a telegraph system for communications between the engine room and navigation. For this prop, I took a lot of inspiration from traditional brass telegraphs found more so on ships. Despite this prop not necessarily being appropriate for a submarine, I felt that this design was more distinctive and would fit in well with the art style. I would end up developing the model and texturing it quickly, but I would encounter an issue. I wanted to add a detailed face on the telegraph’s textures that showed the different inputs that could be selected by moving the levers either clockwise or ani-clockwise. So, I drew a face design in Krita and exported it as a transparent PNG into Substance. Upon doing this however, the face design was repeated as a grid across the entire UV map, and it needed to be resized and rotated to fit correctly. Luckily, the rest of the grid could be hidden with a black mask and the result came out exactly how I envisioned it. As stated before I also developed a set of gemstones that would act as the compromise to the cave’s lighting difficulties. The first thing I kept in mind was that a collectible gemstone prop had already been designed and completed, I didn’t want it to be the exact same design as it was not going to be interactive with the player at all. I took some inspiration from some of the gems found within Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1 as I felt it appeared different enough to set itself apart shape-wise from the collectible gemstone. I would first create and position the gems in the stone in a rather straight fan-like formation but was advised to change it to make it look more natural, in the end I did not run into any problems while texturing it thankfully. After more feedback from our lecturers, I was also tasked with modelling a set of vault doors to act as the sub’s implied treasure storage system. For this I wanted to give the vaults a more stylized design to match some of the other props, So I gave the vaults hexagonal wheels as I felt this would look more like something found within stylized Saturday morning cartoons. Eventually this model would also be utilized as the sub’s entry hatch too, as we were extremely pressed for time at this point to develop an entirely different model for it and it worked well in this regard, despite being repurposed.
Along with working on my own props, I was also tasked with texturing some props Tiernan had created including the vent, porthole window, ladder, and boxes. At the time I was assigned to work on these props, I did not have access to Substance outside of university, so I tried to see if I could texture the models by exporting their UV maps to Krita and drawing the textures on by hand, and the results were not satisfactory and rather sloppy. So, I would get my hands on a substance package and start texturing the models based on how multiple Saturday morning cartoons would have their environments rendered, this meant a lot of line art patterns across the models as well as highlights being depicted with sharp white lines rather than gradients. I did run into some problems with adding the patterns to some of the models like the ladder, where the geometry caused some of the lines to come out as gradients rather than sharp lines which did hinder my ability to make coherent patterns across it in some places. However, I am satisfied with how the outcome for all these models looked and I felt I matched the art style we were going for very well.
Telegraph development process
Submarine Vault development
Cave light stone development
The vent, box, window and ladder models were created by Tiernan O’Donnell, and textured by me.
Early texturing attempts
Final vent textures
Box Textures
Window textures
Ladder textures
Animated ocean backdrop assets
Towards the end of the production. I also took up the task of developing some foreground and background imagery that would pan past the subs windows to make the environment feel more alive, rather than having the sub go through completely unpopulated water for the entirety of the game. For this task, I took some inspiration from how some SNES games like Super Mario World and Super Mario All-Stars had backgrounds with multiple moving layers that implied depth, I would use this to create the images that would pan past the background at random to act as the background animation. Due to the deadline I was advised to just keep them as simple silhouettes, however I first developed a set of 4 coloured rock backdrops that could all be combined in multiple ways to differ the terrain as each of the segments passed by the screen, I would eventually create a blacked out version however and it definitely did feel more in line as we did not want the background to be too distracting which may have happened if we had went with the coloured version. I also created some foreground assets including some shrubs that would sit in front of all the other assets to act as the main foreground animations as well as several images of various aquatic life forms such as a school of fish, a shark and a bloom of jellyfish which would alternate and pan across the screen randomly to add some more variety to the activity within the background. Again, all these assets were also made as basic silhouettes to not distract players too much and the result was satisfactory for what we required.
Overall reflection
In retrospect, I think I was able to deliver all my requirements to this project very well and my contributions towards this project were solid across all the aspects I worked on. However, there are quite a few things I would like to improve upon in future projects. By far, 1 of the biggest factors I would change is my distribution of time among each of these developments, as a lot of these assets ended up being created simultaneously and so my attention was constantly pin-balling across various assets at once. I believe this caused me to lose sight of what my biggest priorities were and as a result some of the aspects of each of my contributions suffered some drops in quality compared to the rest due to the lack of time I left myself with. In future, I am going to keep a note of what aspects need to be classed as high priority and go through development working on 1 aspect at a time to keep the quality consistent with itself. Another aspect I really want to improve is taking initiative for some aspects of a project and be able to identify what needs to be done myself, although I did do this for some parts of the project like the character animation and the design of the engine room, I feel like I could have done more through my own volition. Possibly the biggest example of this is learning how to properly use Github by myself. I would constantly run into trouble with it up until the final submission and I’m now aware that I could have easily prevented all of the trouble I faced by taking more time to look up and understand how GitHub actually worked. To resolve this in future, I shall take dedicated notes when attending to the early development of projects and determine what aspects I would be able to work on and provide the best results with and then work on other assigned parts of a project once I finish my top priorities. Overall, I learned a lot from this module about how I should work within a team on a production. From both the strengths and weaknesses I displayed during this project, I am now aware of what parts of my practices I will need to work on to ensure that I can work within an animation team effectively and how I should approach working on multiple aspects of a production at once. I should take more time to establish how I would approach each task so that I can produce them to a consistent and decent quality. But in any case, I am extremely satisfied with the result of this module, and I feel we managed to make a very solid game demo as a team for this semester.
