Tele Pads & Blocks

When making the game one of the first assets I had started working on was a base for the portal effects later on. The portal indicates the end goal for the player within each level. If you think back to teleporters you see within sci-fi films, they are quite often round; so I had the idea of have a circular shape base, with a centralised section that the player would stand on and be 'teleported' to the next level. There is no specific reason as to why these pads are always round, it just looks much nicer than a sharp edged squared one.

Inspiration:

I wanted the design to be simple, yet when it has the added textures and glowing rings it looks quite striking. The first one was just a simple circle as said before with four little power generators on the side. The central circles and a couple outer rings would be glowing blue as shown below. When adding the Bloom effect to the model in Unity it would make the glow really stand out. I also had the idea to have the light pulsate and flicker so it's not just static. The second design I tried to go with something strange and different. I kept the central circles, but I built around that and made something bigger. I made two variations, one with sharper edges, and the other with smooth. I didn't like this design much as it looked a little flat.

In the end we did not go with either design as they just didn't work within the game. It looked better having just the effect there as they player can just walk into that.

When it comes to making the models for this style of game, we have to be very careful with what we do. We need to make sure it looks mostly perfect / similar on every side of each model otherwise it will break the illusion. This is specifically necessary when making the block paths for the level. If one is off it wouldn't match the others and the player would easily be able to spot the mistake. A few good things about having two people creating assets, is that you can create lots of them in short amount of time, and you can share ideas and create several variations. Owen, the second modeller, both worked on floor blocks that we could give to Bijian, and then he chose which ones would fit in.

With my designs I wanted to keep everything simple, so for most of my designs it is just one or two lines extruded in. Within these lines would be an emissive material, giving off a nice glow when fully finished. Where some of the designs would have glowing edged all around them, I specifically liked the idea of the second one across. I had in mind walkway, or a runway where the lighters would run down either side. It would give the impression the player is following the lights. This would suit the creative point of having each side the same, and the top of the object can be different. However, the issue with this if it comes to a corner it would through off the patter.

Texturing them were quite fun, we were going for a metal / luminescent style as this would really stand out. Being in the darkness of space you would need some bright lights to guide you, so this would suit perfectly. I hadn't used the emissive materials much in Substance Painter before, mainly because I haven't needed to, but you can make some really good-looking models with it.