The 5 Horsemen is open for business!
Me and the rest of my comrades in the stable have set out to create a beautiful and rich game as our final project as an end of four amazing years at Sheridan. We are aiming to create a game that will capture the player with fantastic visuals, dazzling audio and exquisite camera and controls. My role is the CG Lead, namely the chieftain of everything that is 3D. I also have the pleasure to be the level designer in a team surrounded by amazing talent.
Our little game
You are Cairenn. Equipped with your ancient horn, you and your bear companion Killian you are on a quest to find your lost father.
Our game is a vertical slice of an adventurous puzzle game where you will experience a collaborative relationship between you and your AI companion. The puzzles would require you to work together and they would feature unique attributes that would either only fit with your bear or the player. We are also making sure that the player is never taken out of the flow due to very heavy cognitive puzzles. Another aspect of our game was the sense of adventure. Many games tag themselves as adventure games but often lack the feeling of journey through the world. We would make sure to to create an experience that would be rock solid and bullet proof, invoke emotions and feelings with the player, a sense of awe even if the experience stopped half way.
The puzzles
Brothers: A tale of two sons is a great inspiration for us. It features several straightforward puzzles that never takes the player out flow. They are intuitive for the player but still enjoyable to solve. The puzzles could eventually be a bit similar to each other and slow so we would like to break the levels up to minor puzzles and major puzzles.
The reason for this is that the player would have moments of challenge and mastery and it would not be a linear experience where you go from A to B. The major puzzles could be a boss battle, a major system to solve or a series of riddles that lead you to an important item in the game. If the major puzzle is placed at the end of the level, the preceding challenges could act as a build up. Or if the major puzzle is in the middle, the end could serve as a moment of reflection and admiration of your skills, which would build up under the sense of adventure.
The World of Turra
The game takes place on the island world of Turra. It is greatly inspired by Ireland and Scotland due to our hymn to the Celtic culture. The nature in Ireland features such lush and rich forests, fields and flora.
To recreate this in the game is very important to us as the landscape itself invokes a certain set of emotions. We must understand what in the landscape invokes this. Looking at the ecology (placement) of every piece in an Irish forest we can break it down to see what items are definitely needed in the game. Many of these elements are often very challenging to recreate in 3D. Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely possible for a very skilled 3D artist. But one must know the behavior of nature to capture it correctly. A character artist must know anatomy to accurately recreate a human, an environment artist must know why birches bend and grow shorter on a windswept mountain. This is why I have pioneered the use of photogrammetry to capture this.
Photogrammetry is the is the technique where you take pictures from several angles of an asset, run it through a software that can create a point cloud. This point cloud will then be used to generate an actual 3D asset. This program also give you a texture. The fantastic thing about this is that the texture fits the “anatomy” of the rock, and we get the correct behavior of the rock. Applying this technique to rocks, trees, foliage and ground cover, we will be able to recreate the personality that is Irish nature.
Turra
Turra is a world combined of several smaller islands. The main part of the gameplay takes part on the main island, whom is the biggest. Since these islands are suspended in the air, access to each island will be done by suspension bridges. It features a solitary mountain in the middle. This acts as a great landmark for the player in order to get their bearing. The story takes the player up into the mountains eventually. From the start the player always know where they are going and can see the mountain getting closer and closer. But when they are getting higher up the mountain they can eventually see where they came from, and their adventure so far in retrospect. They can see the suspension bridge that brought them onto the main island, previous major puzzles, and eventually the more rocky terrain that brought them into the mountain. This is an important factor in order to invoke that feeling of adventure, and we hope that player will have a sort of “wow” moment realizing that they have traveled a great distance in our imaginary world.
Eirik's Dev Log 