My Contributions to the project
Pest control is a first-person shooter tower defence experience. Your objective is to protect the core from the incoming waves of insectoid aliens seeking earth destruction. In this game, you will personify one of the heroes that will use technology and abilities to save the world from the alien invasion.
Pre-Production: As Design Lead of the project, my responsibilities started by narrowing down the original idea made during the game's pitch to create a solid plan that the team could follow for the next year to create a demo of the first level. I was responsible for talking to both programming and art groups to figure out the methods that were going to be implemented during the project's production phase.
Trailer by Kevin Vickers
Lighting: As part of my responsibilities, I had to make sure the light was both functional and matched the general environment's aesthetic. Lighting was hand placed and adjusted depending on the environment's specific needs and the dynamic objects on it. As the colour scheme was turning too much towards purple tones, I added some colour lights to give a better feeling to the environment and break down the mall's general colour of the mall without breaking with the art direction for the game.
Environment Design: One of the biggest challenges was to capture the essence of a mall closed due to an attack while giving a familiar scenario to the player. Due to time constraints, I needed to create assets that were easy to use again in multiple contexts and optimized enough not to cause performance issues. I made standard male and female mannequins and posed them differently, adding accessories to match each store's theme. I also added some decals to give more variety to the environment and give more credibility about the narrative, where an attack is taking place. These decals included broken tiles, ceiling cracks, wall scratches and signs, among others.
VFX: knowing the difference that VFX can create in the atmosphere of a game, I wanted to emphasize the objective of the level: The Core. For this, I experimented with Shader Graph in Unity, mixed with VFX Graph and animations, to make the core look like the unstable entity that the player needed to defend. The parameters were set up so specific properties could be controlled through script or animation. Some of the states included The core taking damage, full health and low health, and the win screen at the end of the level.
To show the main points of interest, I created a shader that had movement and emission, using colours that greatly contrasted with the rest of the environment, to warn the players about the enemies' spawn points. We used this to keep players far from the spawn point, so the enemies did not have conflict when spawning.
Also, as a solution to enemies destroying suddenly, I created a shader that allowed a smooth transition between the enemy being on the level and disappearing. We also applied this shader to different parts of the dynamic objects, such as other enemies and traps.
Shaders: The idea for the game was to have multiple in-game characters; I created a shader that allowed to control via script different attributes on the player model like the colour and emission of the gloves based on each playable character. For this, I modelled, rigged and textured the model using masks and base colours that allowed me to set them up inside unity to change and adjust parameters as needed.
Texturing artist: During the production phase, I took the role of texturing artist to help create trim sheets to make the art style look more consistent and speed up the process for artists of texturing assets. I made multiple trim sheets and tillable textures that were used for environmental pieces, parts of the characters and weapons. I also textured lower priority assets that would be part of the environment, keeping in mind aspects of optimization and correct UV distribution for lighting purposes.
Trim sheets and models made by me
Model by Jenny Ann Soriano