Visual Progress (Prototype to Vertical Slice)

Hey gamers! Today I am going to show our visual progress starting from our original prototype, all the way to our current vertical slice.

The first thing I needed to do for the prototype was create placeholder assets to show what the assets and art style would look like in the final version of Exclusion Zone: Reclamation. These assets were rough but helped communicate the concept to the team and testers.

The newly created assets were then exported to the test scene in Unity. The test scene allowed me to work out any issues, such as an incorrect pivot point (the point the object rotates around) and an inaccurate scale and rotation when imported. These would have caused problems for the level designer as the objects would not rotate or be sized properly when creating levels. Testing these assets first allowed me to troubleshoot the issues and reimport the assets without changing their visuals.

As we moved toward the vertical slice, I began using a technique called modular asset design. This method relies on splitting up assets into a series of small pieces (such as individual walls of a building) that can be retextured, recoloured, and slightly edited to create many variations and combinations. The assets for one building could then be used to create many different buildings that have different colours, heights, and textures.

It was also important that no obvious seams appear between modular asset pieces. This was achieved by scaling the textures in Substance Painter, so the borders of the texture matched the borders of the pieces. This meant that the textures would connect, causing a seamless effect.

I also created materials for the brick buildings. These were done in Adobe Sampler and, once exported, allowed the entire team to access and use the exact same custom textures when creating assets.

From there, I was able to create more polished assets for the vertical slice. These assets would provide an example of our final style and asset quality and were a great improvement from the initial prototype assets. The assets will also be editable and allow us to add additional elements such as vines, moss, variable height, etc. which will give us a huge advantage when creating unique levels for the final version of Exclusion Zone: Reclamation.