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Hello everyone, Luka here from Kuality Games. Here’s a small post if you’re wondering how we made the environment for our game, Mushroom Muncher. I will be focusing on the texturing part that I did, by just explaining the basics.
Base/White-box:
First of course, we started off with the basics in Unity. Our designer Rafael set up a basic white-box of what was to be our main level in the game. Since we had time constraints because of the jam, we simplified things and decided that our level was supposed to be an arena where enemies would attack the player infinitely. This also reduced the amount of level design we had to do, as well as art assets. At this stage we had the basic level layout and overview of object scales/sizes.
First white-box of Mushroom Muncher arena.
Texturing:
Most of the environment work was done through texturing. I decided to try Substance Designer for the first time and first thing we did was prepare base materials for our environment. Plan was to finish up materials at first and then apply them to the environment meshes that we would model, in Unity. This approach can be different of course, from the traditional “Model it, Fix the UV, Texture it in Photoshop/Gimp”. It didn’t seem like this approach saved a lot of time, but it did give us a lot of control and flexibility in terms of randomizing the look of textures in the game. By using substance materials, I was able to easily blend textures together and instantly randomize the look of Stones, Rocks and Dirt as well. So once the base materials were finished, I started to blend them together in Substance Designer and also exposed a lot of values that made it possible to edit materials in Unity, here’s the example of this:
Procedural texture properties (Unity’s Inspector window)
Here we can see couple of options where we first start off by choosing the surface (Ground or Cliff for example) and then we can start tweaking individual properties. You can see the example of this at work below:
Randomized Rock material – clean.
Rock material – with dirt.
As you can imagine tools such as Substance Designer in this case can be extremely powerful, for both big and small projects. I would recommend any game developer to try them. Here’s another example:
Stone- clean.
Stone – with striation.
At this point base materials were done and they were ready to be used in Unity. Learning and preparation took most of the time, but it was worth it as at that point I could produce random and unique texture for our environment in matter of minutes.
Sculpting/Modeling:
This part was rather simple. Our artist Jenny first sculpted the base rocks in Zbrush, after that moved them to Maya where the low poly meshes were made and some Zbrush decimation errors were fixed. As a last part, she UV-mapped the rocks and exported them to Unity. Applying materials and assembling the scene was done in the game engine.
All of the base meshes we used in the environment including the ground sculpt.
In Unity:
After the meshes were prepared, we had everything ready in order to assemble the arena in Unity. Even though we had the ground sculpt prepared, we had to scrap it and go with the flat surface in order to avoid some of the gameplay problems we were having and particles intersecting with the ground. There could have been much more done about the ground, but in the game itself ground texture tiling wasn’t that visible and it didn’t make much of a difference in the end. We added some extra props quickly in order to make the arena a bit more interesting as we were running out of time.
Shot of the arena from the side.
Conclusion:
It was very interesting to work with Substance software for the first time and approach things differently, that is why I would recommend this to any artist/game developer out there. We did face some problems such as these procedural materials increasing the loading time of our game significantly, but that was due to bad optimization of these materials by me in Substance Designer itself. Even though optimization can help, these materials can still be quite heavy so that is something to consider.
In the end what we managed to create in three days still looks nice and doesn’t mess around with the gameplay, so I would consider that a success. If you have any questions feel free to ask on Twitter: @KualityLuka. You can also find us on Facebook.
Cheers.
Tags: environment, jam, LD35, MushroomMuncher, mushrooms, substance, unity, unity3d
