Crystal Frenzy (2019)
3D-modelling, Rigging, Animation, Materials and Environment, UI & Game Design
A 3D Rogue-like real-time strategy game, where the player commands an army of Goblins who must fight against the Furst that protect their forest's magical life crystals.
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For this project, I worked on 3D-modelling the characters, buildings and scenery assets. Additionally, I worked on the Game Design and User Experience. I also designed some UI-elements such as the icons. Finally, I worked on the Main Menu front-end.
Overview
Crystal Frenzy was made for the Interactive Media project, where we had to design and create our own game from the ground up. The original game idea was quite different from the final result: a rogue-like dungeon crawler. However, after a few brainstorming sessions and meetings we changed direction and set out to create a very ambitious real-time strategy game where the world would change depending on who was winning the game.
A week in we found out that it was over-scoped, and brought it down to the feature set that it has today: a single-player rogue-like RTS, where instead of building a base and fighting an AI or friend, you would conquer nodes and escort a mining vehicle and protect it from waves of enemies. Each crystal node has it's own rewards such as currencies or upgrades, but some have building tiles.
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Buildings can be build to upgrade your food capacity (allows you to have more units), unlock new units, or upgrade your units. Your main fortress and conquered nodes can be used to repair and upgrade your miner.
The player can train several units, with the limiting factor being their food capacity. Units are based on typical classes such as melee, ranged and magic caster. Upgrades were added to give units and your mining vehicle some more protection and add some damage to your attacks. These upgrades can be made through buildings, which can be build on building tiles.
My Responsibilities
For this project I had several responsibilities.
As my partner was focussing on the programming side of the project, I was working a lot on the look of the game.
Ranging from 3D-modelling to UI Design
Game Design
Together with my project partner, I worked on the game design of Crystal Frenzy. This was a very collaborative process, where we took inspiration of games that we loved from our childhood, such as Age of Empires and Warcraft.
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During the development of the game, we came up with new ideas for game mechanics. For some design problems, we made use of the Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell and applied several of the lenses found within. This resulted in an improved game design.
Art Direction
As my project partner focussed on the programming side of the game, I was in charge of the visuals. I took inspiration from fantasy and playful cartoony elements from the game Fairytale Fights. This meant color and exaggerated visual elements.
We wanted a contrast between the Goblins and Fursts, so the look of their units and technologies is quite different. The challenge was to still have the playfulness in the designs.
Bloom was added to emphasize a fantasy like feeling, making things that emit light glow and it gave a softer look to the visuals. This really enhanced the look of the crystals found throughout the world.
3D-models
For this project I made most of the 3D assets found in the game, apart from a few due to time constraints. These models were made using Autodesk Maya.
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I learned a lot about optimizing meshes in this phase and getting an appropriate vertices-count. In retrospect, the characters could have been optimized further but due to time constraints it was not feasible to redo/rework all the character models.
Materials
For materials I mostly relied on simple colors for materials, in some cases I used textures such as the terrain or bigger parts of an asset. Many textures we used were from the Unity Asset store as it sped up development and due to the fact that I do not have much experience creating textures.
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The units, water, lava, trees and crystals feature textures that were created by me for this project.
Animations
As the game is an RTS and the camera is further away in regular gameplay, animations had to be very expressive and exaggerated.
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Each unit has a unique idle and attack animation. Most of the units share the same walk cycle. This also means that some units share rigs.
Environment Design
The environment design was done once the layout of the map was determined, after which I started sculpting the terrain, painting textures and trees. Once this was done environmental assets, such as rocks and crystals were added around the environment to fill in certain empty spots, to add variety and to create some landmarks on the map.
UI Design
I designed the layout of the user interface for this game, where I focused on communicating the most important information to the player. This includes their currencies, miner health, objective, tool-tips, main menu and controls screen.
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As I needed to focus on modelling, I used a Unity Store asset that gave us a selection of UI sprites for panels and buttons. Using this selection of assets, the UI was assembled.
Prototype testing
Every day we had an updated build which I tested in the morning. After each play session I would have found some bugs or gameplay issues/suggestions, which I then discussed with my partner.
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This resulted in daily playtests, QoL improvements, and ultimately an improved user experience.
3D Assets
Almost all 3D-models were made by me for this game, this means the environment assets, buildings, characters and creatures. However, due to time constraints I was unable to create models for some of the enemies that would be encountered later on in the game. All characters and creatures were rigged and animated, some share certain animations, but all have their own unique attack animations.
These models are available on my ArtStation portfolio.
Note: I am still uploading these, so not all models may be available.
