Echoes of Regret Assets
As part of a Games Now! gamejam project, Echoes of Regret, I was in charge of designing and making most of the game's models. As the game takes place in a haunted forest, so I chose a low-fidelity style to evoke the kind of horror atmosphere we wanted, using techniques in Unity to provide the game's lo-fi look.
Most textures were based on photographs scaled down and colour-adjusted to match the game's atmosphere.
Apart from these static meshes, I was also involved in tech art implementation for the project.
When players activate corpse objects, a billboard texture rises upwards, before slowly dissolving. This effect was achieved using an unlit transparent cutout material and slowly lowering the alpha via script.
The texture was created by taking a stock image of a skull, removing the background and smearing the lower half of the image downward. The alpha values around the texture created by those two processes lent it to being dissolved the way I did.
A spirit being freed in-game.
As part of the decor in one of the scenes, I had a summoning circle with candles. However, with each candle having the same animation, it looked unnatural as they flickered at the same rate.
To offset the animations, I created a script that would take the candle's transform and use it as a seed to randomise the time it took for the candle to light up. As the candles were initialised and loaded away from the player's camera, they wouldn't see the candles light up, only encountering them once they had finished lighting.
The ritual candles lighting up off-camera at runtime.
While the game's 3D assets were a large part of the game's low-fidelity look, the camera setup was instrumental to make the game look more authentically lo-fi and retro.
This was achieved by removing the scene's main camera from the player character and replacing it with one linked to a render texture. Beneath the map, the main camera was pointed at a plane displaying the output of this render texture, configured to display at a lower resolution and with no post-processing VFX applied.
This went a long way to make many visual facets of the game (especially animated ones) look more convincing, with lower detail in the camera requiring more inference from the player to interpret. Viewing the low-fidelity 3D environment in full HD only showed its shortcomings, while this setup made it feel more consistent.
Thomas West MMXXIII