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Project: MACHINA
Game Demo for a semester long project with Team Lunatic Kappa: Artemis Feng, Daniela Molina (team lead/coding), Daniel Henein (animator/writer), Juan Lopez (level designer), Jaiden Jackson (coding/team lead/lead artist).
Animator, 3D texture support, UI Designer, Concept Designer, Illustrator, Social Media
--Aesprite, Photoshop, Blender, PremierePro, After Effects--
Trailer
Overview
This semester long project was designed as a part of a class called Indie Game Studio, taught by Andrew Augustin. This project was broken into parts and "sprints," organized into manageable pieces to keep students on track. At the beginning of the semester, our class was broken into four teams with randomly chosen students. Though working with strangers can usually be a difficult experience, our team ended up bonding over our creations and we were able to compose a polished game demo that our team was very proud of.
During the first part of the game design process, we were expected to create a logo for our game studio and brainstorm the direction for our process. After an iterative process and with the help of our professors and peers, we came up with the following logo, designed by Daniel Henein and agreed to design a game after a story Daniel Henein had written.
During the course of the project, we kept track of our progress and records through discord, and organized references, resources, announcements, etc into different channels. Daniela Molina organized the frequency and times of weekly meetings.
In addition to our documentation to support our weekly sprints, we had a miro board that to keep track of our designs and processes.
In our first sprint, our team drafted some concept sketches, finished our main character and enemy designs, and put together a game mockup. During this process, I was in charge of designing initial sketches for environment and asset concepts for a game taking place in an abandoned underground train station.
During the second part of the sprint, our team focused on UI designs. During this process, I put together several moodboards for fonts, UI, and styles, then drafted the final UI buttons for the game.
For the previous mockup, I had designed the UI based on the vision I was given at the time. After iterating with the team, I drew up a couple buttons for the game and created a figma wireframe
Final version
During the third sprint, our team focused on sound design. While Jaiden Jackson and Juan Lopez worked on this aspect of our game, the game artists continued work on animations. I designed an iteration of the small enemy. This was my first time designing mechs, and I had a great time exploring machine components, shape language, and color language.
Iterations to final (left to right)
After this sprint, we worked towards the first playable build, where I animated the enemy character that I had previously designed, while the team worked on coding, making models and assets for the game.
After this, our process became more freeform. We started working on areas which we had previously started. During this sprint, I designed another enemy, inspired by a bull, and finished animating it.
During the next sprint, we readied our game for playtest.
In our next sprint, we focused on social media. I was tasked with creating splash art/illustrations to promote our game, and wrote up an audience research analysis document to base our social media plan off of.
During Sprint 7, I helped with texturing models for our game in Blender.
In Sprint 8, I began illustrating splash art to promote our game. After iteration, I came up with the following composition, which I colored and rendered.
I came up with several iterations of drafts and sketches. Upon showing it to the team, we decided to proceed with the first iteration. After drafting, I colored in a flat version of the image, then lit and rendered it.
In Sprint 9, we continued iterating towards our build, polishing our itch page and social media.
During Sprint 10, I worked on animating our ability icons, which are collectibles that can be found around the environment.
From this point on, we were reaching our final sprints. We focused on social media. I created a linktree, youtube channel, and instagram for our game, and we created a blog-style devlog in discord. I also updated our box art as requested to fit the format that was required.
Lastly, I made a couple of reels to promote our game in Premiere Pro
And this was created to fit the Youtube Shorts Format
If you stayed this long, thank you so much for reaching the end! This was the biggest project that I have worked on to date. Hoping for more to come in the future. I am very proud of myself and my team for what we were able to achieve and the beautiful aesthetic that we came up with. Here is the link to all of the assets that I've talked about and more in our google drive.
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