For the third and the final project of University of the Art's first term, we were asked to take inspirations from poster artist Tom Eckersley’s works, find a piece of his artwork and turn it into a playful experience. We were given link to view his works on VADS’ site, and later that week we were taken to a tour to his archive on campus.
Main Theme
Play the Game In Browser
Making Of
Left: Testing smear visuals in After Effects. Right: The final result without the smear effect, recorded from Unity.
Hierarchies are set up so that when a root object transforms (including translation, rotation, and scaling) its children objects will follow this transformation. However, looking into the movements of a real cockerel, we can see that a cockerel, with many other kind of birds, tend to move their heads to a fixed position first, and then the body follows, so that the eyes can capture visuals as steady as possible, hence the bobbing movements.
Say if I put the head hierarchy under the body hierarchy, they will both move simultaneously. That will not work in this case. To solve this problem, I simply set up an “empty object” that simply marks the “destination” of where the body needs to be finally, then the real body components waits for a split second before it “catches up” to the head, using the DOTween tool and linear interpolation. Other components require a delay were also set up in this way.
In addition to the movements, to make the cockerel more stylish, I applied random wiggle to its eye, and it will follow the cursor.
From left to right: The cockerel components, the hierarchy in the scene, and the editor that controls the cockerel.
Then I composed the music for this project and started to put everything together. The theme tune took inspiration from the recently published Untitled Goose Game. From the beginning I knew I want the music to be minimal as possible, so is the UI. So halfway through the making of the music I designed the UI as well. It simply reads the title of the game after a prompt to hold space, making the cockerel to crow. Then the city wakes up. The ambient sounds changes as well: when it’s day time, you can hear the sounds of an office and the traffics of the city, whereas at night, the sound fades to crickets and forest ambience. These were all parts of the overall design of this project.
Credits
Original Art by
Tom Eckersley
Interactive Created by
Hu Chi
