Videogame made 100% by me, using Unity, AnimVR, Houdini, Stable Diffusion and Blender
Pretty short teaser of the game as it was during January 2022
First Idea
It all started with a typo, and the thought... "how would that game go?"
A neuron.. battling against.. some kind of virus enemies? .. an endless runner, escaping a stream of blood or whatever?
i've finally decided for a platform game inspired by classic 3D platform games like mario64, crash, spyro and such, since i grew up playing those. It's also vaguely RPG/graphic adventure inspired, with dialogs and choices here and there.
Development
It all started with the concept art on photoshop, i made doodles and played around with color combinations for a while until i went with this.
Then i moved onto AnimVR, i created my character there keeping in mind that each separate layer will allow me to apply different materials later. So i made layers for the body, the eyes, the teeth, and the "core", which ended up looking more like a tounge. You can read (and see) more about my VR sculpting shenaniganz here
After exporting the alembic from AnimVR, i opened it in Blender, where i gave it the right materials, merged all the layers, then rigged it and exported as FBX so i could animate him inside Unity. Here's how he looked on Blender
The process in Unity is fairly obvious, i imported the FBX, created animations for Idle-Walk-Jump-Run-Fall-Land, coded it's controls, which btw i made sure there's a choice to use Xinput, or keyboard and mouse. I'll share some gifs of the animations. I'm constantly changing and improving them so don't consider any of these final (you probably can tell the ones i've put more work into)
As for levels, i started testing using Unity's default cubes. I needed a way to create better levels and AnimVR wouldn't do because it's not exactly a polygon efficient way to 3D model. Also i needed a fast and easy way to create a lot of levels, so procedural came to mind. Which software i've heard allows to do such thing on Unity? Houdini
I never used Houdini before so it took a few tries to get something working. But as the moment i wrote this i managed to create both platform based levels and "cave-like" levels. Both are done polyextruding curves that merge with each other creating a slightly more complex shape. I can edit that directly inside Unity, so i can rapidly test if there's any issues with the generated mesh's collider, or if it needs more polygons for it's size to avoid looking too blocky or whatever. I've added some parameters to make the surface noisier like a mountain, to smooth the parts where the curves overlap, change the UV mapping, and so on. Nothing too fancy but enough to tinker with until i'm happy with the results. If necessary, when i settle for a shape i can export into blender, and add some final touches or some polish. Usually it's not necessary.
Here you can see my level editor in action. If you know anything about houdini you'll know it's pretty basic, but it does the job
Back into Unity, i created custom shaders so my non-UV-mapped 3D models could have textures and normalmaps using triplanar mapping. But i mostly don't use triplanar, i use vertex colors with blendmodes. Either way, i can color-swap my characters, enviroments and props in many different ways without having to keep texture duplicates, therefore saving a lot of disk space. And time. I mostly used this to create different skins for the main character, that along with some props that attach to his limbs, change his appeareance and slightly alter the gameplay mechanics, like walk speed, jump height, and such, to mix things up a little.
Most of these use the same shader (even for the attachments) and no textures!
Oh, you might wonder about the music. I started creating the first tunes using an algoritmic tool online. It had options to change instruments, genres and more, quite cool. After that, a guy called Emma Blanco offered to make some music for the game, and did a bunch of tracks, but he dissapeared some months ago so i moved onto creating MIDI tunes using artificial intelligence and then applying instruments and polishing them a little in Ableton. I'm no musican or producer, so the tracks are probably a disaster if you know anything about music, but to me they sound good enough, and kinda cute.
And about sound effects, i made all of them using tools like rfxgen, sfxia, LabChirp and Bfxr. Anything that doesn't sound computer generated (like fire, water, wind sfx) are ripped and edited from random videos online
my first algorithmic tune, which i still use as the main menu theme
One of the tracks made by Emma Blanco
one of the latest AI generated MIDI tracks i've done
What am i currently working on?
In 2022 i started using artificial intelligence to create concept-art and textures. Hopefully that sounds interesting enough to get you to click and read about it here.
Besides that, with the little time i currently have i'm improving every single texture and shader to give it my own personal look to it, also polishing some gameplay stuff, adding cutscenes, fixing bugs, and just making it more fun to play with little events, secrets, choices to make, and such. I have no idea when i'll be done since i keep finding new stuff to improve, and i barely have any time to do all this.. but i'll wrap it up and publish eventually
Screenshots
Characters concept art/rendered
VERY outdated trailer for the first demo release
