Turtology

(WIP name)

My role: Artist, game designer

Turtology was inspired by a silly video of some tortoises and has developed into a game that has so far taken a year to create. The point of this cosygame is to look after the creatures we call turts you do this by feeding them, and by making the enclosure nicer. This game is a work in progress.

It has been a really fun project to work on, and has really helped me to expand my skillset, not only artistically but in other technical ways.

The Turts

A key issue for me was how to create the turts, modelling and animating characters was one option, but I was struggling to give them a good (slightly derpy) personality. When we were paper prototyping I drew a turt from the side on, as a way to show what they looked like, in subsequent prototypes I drew more, and eventually came to a design I really loved.

I had never done 2D sprite characters, and felt that the mixture of 2D and 3D could work really well.

Plants

Usually when creating plants I will buy packages, however I wanted to try my hand at making a climbing plant, specifically to decorate the trellis and walls.

I started by researching different climbing plants, eventually settling on one I liked, a climbing hydrenga.

This initial research led to me abstracting the shape of the plant, looked at from a distance the leaves tend to collect in roughly hemispherical bunches, with the flowers at the center.

After a few different versions I settled on keeping the leaf artwork quite simple, but having a more complex mesh to show the leaves on. Unfortunately I had to remove the flowers as they made everything look too busy.

I made the mesh using procedural modeling.

I then made a swaying shader, and dotted the plant around the scene.