Starcats is a 4 player party game that's a fusion between cooperative and competitive play set in a colorful 3D procedurally generated world.
Across the development of Starcats, I served a number of roles. My primary role was creating a number of the 3D in-game assets, their corresponding textures, and shaders. I additionally served as the 3D animator, edited the official YouTube trailer video, and now act as lead artist.
Starcats was the final product of our senior capstone class, and as such was made on a tight schedule while also keeping other classes in check. With this in mind, when developing assets, I made sure that polygon counts were as low as possible. The benefits were twofold: a low-poly art style reduced the load our highly dense game world had on hardware and allowed us to work quickly. Conveniently, it also closely matched our concept art. 4-way split-screen and zoomed-out camera helped to smooth out many of the rounder shapes that would otherwise have visible chamfering.
Additionally, in order to reduce the number of textures and materials we used, help ensure consistency and make our assets more modulable, I set up our models such that each biome only utilized one texture. These textures were divided into 9 squares, each representing a specific color or gradient within that biome's palette. Each model's UVs were mapped to the individual gradients as needed. This way, a single material could be applied to every model within a biome, and models used across many biomes would still have a unique appearance.
Having spanned two semesters for a total of 9 months of development, Starcats was one of the larger projects I've had the pleasure to work on. Starcats placed in the top 5 in 2017's E3 College Game Competition and thus had the honor to be presented on the show floor during the live event. The game is now seeking publication on Steam.
