Global Game Jam 2022
Standard Steve In The Scary Place

Myself and 2 friends got together to participate in Global Game Jam 2022 (for those who don't know, a game jam is where you have to make a game from scratch in 48 hours based off a theme set by the organizers). The theme was Duality. Usually, we are a very "gameplay" focused team when it comes to jams but this time we started with aesthetics first. One of the programmers (Spencer Rose) created a Ray Trace shader with a really weird, pixelated look to it, and that pretty much influenced the entire game. The actual gameplay consists of using "light grenades" to illuminate a broken world. It started as a survival horror and then the vibe shifted a little as we continued working.

You can download and play the game here.
YOU NEED AN RTX GRAPHICS CARD TO RUN IT!

It takes about a minute for the actual game to start the gameplay. Before that you kind of walk around aimlessly.

https://globalgamejam.org/2022/games/standard-steve-scary-place-1

I was responsible for the 3D aspects, Character design/modeling/animation, Level design and environment art. (also a tiny bit of audio design).

Character

I really wanted to focus on silhouette as that's pretty much 90% of the game but I also wanted to make the character feel relatable, not just a "monster", I wanted the player to potentially feel sorry for it, which led me to a much less threatening slender figure, with turned-in knees, and hunch back, it's almost more "cute" than scary. The illuminated eyes help a lot, in 2 ways, they give you the opportunity to connect with the character and they are also really creepy haha. I made a low poly human character and then took it into Zbrush and started pushing it around until I got something I liked. Then rigged it and started trying to get some animations down to bring the character to life and see how it would translate to the game with the weird pixel shader.

Environment

We were using a lot of really basic primitives to test various things, and we noticed pretty quickly that less was more considering how pixelated and insane the shader was. I started making different primitives with small interesting changes to fill out the level. Boxy shapes/straight edges got greebled to give the silhouette some definition and create pockets for visual interest when the environment got illuminated. I created some spheres with "sci-fi" cuts in them to play with masking out the emissive textures and then inverted them in certain areas to play into the environment’s "story". I created clusters of hexagon cylinders at various heights to create visual interest on the horizon line when staring off into the distance. I also picked random cylinders out of the clusters to add an emissive texture to. Pretty much did a bunch of random stuff playing with the contrast between dark and light, and trying to find simple but effective shapes to play with.