We have begun the journey of creating our first Unity game “Mr Fox” (working title). Our intent is to make a 2D platform type game that includes not only defeating enemies but also requires solving puzzles, treasure hunting and interacting with NPC’s . We are also contemplating multiple endings depending on choices made during play.
Our playable character is a cheeky little fox who is an undead soul collector working for The Queen of the Land of the Dead.
Here is a rough concept art sketch for the initial environment.
We are looking for advice on what setup / layout we could use for game design. Our initial thoughts are to take the various components (background images, character art, scenery items, etc) into different layers to make manipulating them easier and to allow for characters to move in front or behind scenery items.
Been working away on scenery elements for the game as flat 2D models (cardboard theater style) and starting to set these up in Unity as the beginnings of the environment.
The textures are being made from photographs taken by myself (Sakura) around Melbourne and while traveling on holidays. The photos are being cropped, extra details added and colors manipulated to give the overall style with dark outlines added to add definition to each of the pieces. Haven’t quite worked out how to use the transparency or cutout yet for the textures, works different to my main 3D program, so there are still black backgrounds showing.
The alpha channel is now working in the textures as a Cutout on the scenery objects for the game. Finally figured out how to make an alpha channel in Paint Shop Pro for the png image file (texture). It works nicely in Unity
Now looking at other platform games as online game play videos for inspiration to create this one. Would anyone like to make a suggestion for a game to have a look at? . . . something with horror or dark elements, good story lines and dynamic game play, something a little unusual . . . have had a look at “Salt and Sanctuary”, “Unraveled” and “Ori and the Blind Forest” already this past week, and some old “Castlevania”.
Technical Process:
Still having problems with adding the alpha channel to texture images to use as “cutout” for some of the objects . . . so nothing to show in Unity at the moment while we figure this one out. May have to take the long road of making the texture alphas in our 3D modelling program which saves the alpha with the rendered image.
Creative Process:
Making a few more concept cut & pastes for the environment. The color is not quite right yet on the Tower on the Hill, yet the photographs came together better than we thought We have a few stand in poses for the playable character Mr Fox which we’ll post next time to give an idea of relative sizes and play once the alpha problem is resolved.
For what it’s worth, I like the hand-drawn art style that you are using for the concept sketches, even though you don’t intend to use that in the finished game. I think that if the colors were more cohesive, it could be an interesting art-style for an actual game.
Thanks I had considered drawing everything at one point by hand from photos, and then decided to use cropped photographs as the actual scenery props. I’m just not too keen on drawing digitally and prefer 3D modelling.
Finally resolved the problem with attaching alpha mapping to textures. After looking at various bits of information for Paint Shop Pro on how to do it and getting confused a lot, it ended up being a simple option of making the background transparent and saving it out as a png image, that I stumbled on by looking at a render I’d made in Lightwave for a Mr Fox stand-in image which I’d brought into PSP to have a look at.
So here’s the result in Unity and it works fine and so now you can see the playable character Mr Fox (he’s also my avatar) seemingly leaping through an arch.
After giving it more thought and struggling with the look in terms of colors being cohesive in the game, went back and tried a more hand-drawn approach for the pieces to make up the environment. At least this way the colors can have a palette for any particular part of he game. This time the photos, toned down, are being used as textures for the line art
Had to re-draw the initial pieces for Mr Fox and add some new ones. Starting to look good
This is just a work-in-progress layout made in my paint program to see if it all fits together properly. It’s been fun making these pieces, frustrating at times trying to have them fit together with each other and be the right size. The colors are more integrated now too with some nice ghostly vegetation.
