Table Toys | Repository

T&B is played with cards, some featuring a wax seal with an icon corresponding with the card's ability. Initially, game artists were using a geometry-based approach, but this would have been frustrating for our workflow, and unforgiving for revisions.
As a solution, I created a unity Shader Graph shader that would take a monochrome image file and generate diffuse, normal, and specular maps dynamically. With this, artists could work on quickly producing these monochrome icons, and it was little issue to tweak said icons during testing. Colours could also be changed for anything using the shader, or per-individual materials using the shader. With a single seal mesh, we could make any number of seals for cards as long as we had the icon for them.

Wax seal model and seal icons created by Rachel Appleyard

I created the logic for a book with changing pages for an earlier project, though without proper animations, the illusion wasn't as convincing. Here, I created some homemade animations for a book mesh, using an array of textures to swap between different pages (which is upwardly scalable for as many page textures as you want).
There are several materials handling pages, including some for the flipping pages that only appear when the pages turn, that swap at the right times to create the illusion of turning to a new page. All in all, it creates a convincing book that adds some atmosphere to the original tabletop setting of T&B.
While the animations aren't perfect (I had to offset the flipping pages to prevent clipping), with a better looking mesh and animation from a dedicated artist, this script and setup would go a long way.

One of the first prototypes I made for T&B, the abacus was a means to track player resources.
The abacus has a straightforward implementation, with each rung having three arrays: one for the bead objects, one for the forward positions, and one for the backward positions. Theoretically, any number of beads could be added to rungs and the script would handle whatever was added to the arrays. The amount of beads was controlled with a single index, allowing for simple logic and debugging.

Abacus model created by Rachel Appleyard

The candle was a fun idea for an in-game health meter. With no way for players to regain lost Life Points, the candle made for a straightforward metaphor.
Following the style of older time-keeping candles, each peg represents a point of LP. After reaching a critical threshhold (similar to the low health music in games like Pokémon), the flame begins to flicker and the its colour becomes deeper. Each falling peg makes a sound, signposting HP loss diegetically.
Similar to the other items, the pegs are stored in an array and the number of them can be increased or decreased as game balancing requires.

While exploring ideas for the playable surface for cards, I created this prototype of a floating island. I wanted an obvious relationship between Life Points and the empty board spaces, where players recived damage to their LP. Playtests showed that players would sometimes get confused about the relationship with their own LP and individual cards' Health Points.
Here, the exposed, fleshy spaces definitely express vulnerability. If a card is covering a space, it intuitively explains the mechanics of the card soaking up the damage instead of the player. I was inspired by visual and narrative cues from the EvaEvangelion and the Daleks of Doctor Who, i.e. things with robotic exteriors (in this case, rocky) that hid something biological.

To further the visual metaphor, when the player gets hit with enough damage, their island crumbles and the organs of the island-organism are exposed to the open, demonstrating danger and vulnerability. The organ animations were made with simple transform-based animations in-engine, while the pulsating spaces on the surface were done with C# vertex manipulation. The lo-fi look of the game allowed for this to be used

Island model created by Luna Henry