Made for the Abertay Game Development Society’s Midsummer Jam, Off Course is a simple game where players float around trying to collect parts of their ship to reassemble it before their oxygen runs out.
As part of a 5-man team, I was responsible for all of the art seen in the game, from particle systems, lighting, post processing to the models themselves.
Making Models
All of the 3D art was done in MagicaVoxel, an intuitive open source voxel based modelling package:
When importing the assets into the engine, I utilised a Unity plugin to convert the raw .vox files to .obj. Using the texture files generated by this plugin, I would make alternate textures to take advantage of Unity’s PBR Standard shader, particularly with emission.
Adding Atmosphere
All 2D art was made in GIMP, such as the nebulae or black holes. While the black-holes are a gameplay mechanic, most of the 2D art was made to overlay on top of the game to enhance the lighting. For the nebulae, I would slowly rotate them during gameplay to give the illusion of the sprites being animated.
To accent the emissive lighting and improve visibility of gamplay critical assets (such as parts of a ship), I attached point lights to each instance, some shadow casting, others not. Each object type would have its own colour: yellow for ship parts, red for black holes, green for oxygen tanks and blue for asteroids.
Summary
Overall the project was a great success, and by far the most complete and robust title I’ve worked on in a game jam.
Robert J Harper 