Tarantella

Tarantella was the third game project I was a part of at Futuregames which spanned over 7 weeks.

It is a turn-based strategy game set in the wild west with elements of chess.

The project was made in Unity and my main focus was characters, rigging, VFX and ground-solver.

I took the crate that my teammate created, broke it down to parts and added the missing faces and aligned the new UVs to the existing texture. Back in Unity I added a rigidbody and box-collisions to all the pieces. I made a dusty VFX and a script that replaced the the box with a prefab containing the cut up model and then triggered a physics explosion. This way the crate breaking would look different each time thanks to the force randomization in the script.

We decided to add an explosive crate so I took my bonfire effect and from it created an explosion, burning debris and attached it to the flying crate pieces and just switching out the crate material.

The Henchmen. Expendable member of Rockys Gang of Bandits. Some can walk further than others and some are immune to being moved. Keep track of the colors to know how The Henchmen will move.

We had trouble with the enemy death animation because of the high pace of the game, so I tried cutting him up and applying the same script as on the box.  We loved it and it captured the over the top violence, tarantino-esque vibe we were going for. I reworked the blood effect I was working on, attached it to all of the flying body parts and finished by creating a sub emitter, making the blood pool on the ground. At first I wanted the blood to stay until the map changed but it turned out to be too distractive so I decreased the duration and made it fade quicker.

I rigged the henchmen with IK/FK arms, stretchy spine and snowshoes.

"Tarantella", or Ella if you are on her good side. The fastest knife in the west, her weapon of choice after Rocky cut off both of her index fingers rendering her unable to use a revolver.

I tried to spend as little time on the characters as possible because of our set camera angle. The skin is hand painted but clothes and accessories are made out of tweaked smart materials and smart masks to save time. I kept the low poly on the characters as simple as possible, baking down most of the information, to make it easier for our animator.

I created a tiling ground material in substance designer and a floor tile in zbrush. The designers needed the tiles to be connected so I combined the floor tile with a thinner, wider square, lowered the floor tile and hid the square under the ground plane. Keeping the pivot in the middle of the square made snapping and rotating them around very easy without breaking the game board. I lowered the opacity on the floor tile material thus blending it with the ground material, duplicated it and tinted them slightly lighter and darker than the ground material. This created a subtle, familiar chess-feeling which helped guide the eye around the board, and also suited the game designers grid-feedback.

Some of the textures I made in photoshop for the VFX. I love working with 2D art and combining it with 3D.