PUBLISHED TO STEAM: Feb. 21, 2020
GAME: Tex-Mechs
COMPANY: SMU Guildhall
ENGINE: Unreal Engine 4
PROJECT DURATION: 19 Weeks
DEVELOPMENT TEAM: 16 Devs
Game Designer: Len Medina
Lead Producer: Helen Tang
Lead Programmer: Jake Klinkert
Lead Artist: Julia Corsi
Lead Level Designer: NA
Stakeholders: Steve Stringer, Martin Sawkins, Doug Service, Claire Bian, Brandon Stephens
Description:
Tex-Mechs is a first-person, single-player, action-adventure mech shooter where you fight to reclaim the insect-infested wastelands of the alien colony, New Texas. Riding your ranching mech repurposed for combat, you battle alien hoards of insects that are determined to destroy you and your fellow settlers.
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My Responsibilities (Art Lead, 1 of 4 artists):
- Create concept art, texture breakdowns, and callout sheets for the rest of the art team
- Establish and maintain style consistency across all assets and textures
- Ensure set-dressing was well-placed and assets were properly used
- Communicated with other leads and stakeholders on a weekly basis
- Conducted art-only meetings at the beginning and end of each sprint to check in with my team
- Maintain the Art style guide and keep it updated with each new addition or change
- Consistently addressed scope issues in meetings
ART STYLE GUIDE
I created the Art style guide for this game based on the established vision of the game designer, which was to look like Overwatch. However, after assessing where my art team's texturing skills and strengths were, I decided that emulating the painted style of Overwatch would be detrimental to the game, so I compromised a toony look with the Borderlands-esque style that you see in the above images.
I really wanted to make sure that I was conveying the necessary information in a way that included the least amount of scrolling - when you're in the midst of making an asset on a deadline, I didn't want my artists to waste precious time having to scroll through pages upon pages of documentation. So, I broke the ASG into essentials that they could access easily.
I also really wanted to place an importance on unified naming conventions and unified art tools. Whether that was achieved in the end, I'm not too sure - we had a lot of content to make and we were severely OVERSCOPED for the entire duration of this project, so we didn't really follow conventions when it came down to it at the end of the day.
For texturing, I definitely wanted to create a reference for my artists. These were early texture style explorations during our prototype phase during Summer. However, due to a lot of team dynamic complications early on, this texturing style didn't make it very far. It's probably a good thing, as the added amount of painterly detail would've complicated reaching a cohesive style in the end.
For our enemies, I wanted to provide as much information as I could for the artist sculpting their highpoly models (Erick Rodriguez). I also wanted to make sure that color palettes were cohesive across the board, and created a palette sheet for added accessibility, as our creature modeler is color-blind.
I also had the joy of having one of our level designers (Yujia 'Max' Liu) as our technical and VFX artist. Working with him to create VFX that would fit in with our game was a unique and new experience for me, so it was nice to learn about that side of the art process. He made things really easy to understand and was very flexible with any demands that came from the game designer.
CONCEPT ART
As the lead artist on this project, I wasn't allowed to work on anything that was considered "critical path." This, however, did not last long. We only had three artists on the developers side of the team, and a MASSIVE scope from the get-go. As lead, I felt it was my duty to step in and assist my team as much as I could, regardless of whether it was on critical path things or not. As such, I took on concept art as part of my contributions to my team.
Environment concept art is not my strongest, but the rest of my artists were also all character-centric artists, so nobody really wanted to create environment concepts. Our game was very environment-heavy, which was a little off-putting to my team and I.
TONE VIDEO
During the prototype phase in Summer, I decided to help find the tone of the game by creating a tone video - the idea of which I took from Supergiant Games' Transistor tone video. Granted, it's not as polished as theirs, but it helped to get the rest of the team and even the leads on the same page and heading in the same direction. Team cohesion was a significant problem throughout the entire duration of this project.
The script was written by our team's level design manager at the time, Jaye Garrison-Stuber Weston-Wong.
It was actually quite enjoyable to make this little animatic. I took a lot of inspiration from Red Dead Redemption 2, as that was the strongest point of reference for Western-set media in gaming. This was done in a single evening, from storyboards to voice acting.
PRODUCTION
Production began in late August and wrapped up in mid-December. During production, not only was I responsible for my duties as a lead - ensuring that my team was taken care, of that the other leads got what they needed from me or didn't need anything at all, made sure that my tasks were being taken care of - but also as an additional artist helping to create assets for the team.
The first order of business was to completely revamp the designs for our enemies - the Crawlers. While one of my artists did a really good job at creating illustrative renditions of two crawler versions, it didn't quite fit what our game designer had in mind. Granted, she also didn't really convey what she wanted, so it was a bit of a guessing game regardless. It was quite hard to tell my artist that we weren't going to use his designs, as one thing that I hate doing is shutting down other people's work. But, it had to be done, and this was the result.
I wanted to create an enemy that would be easy to spot while traversing the environment in-game. I referenced a few poisonous animals for the color scheme, one of them being a Black Widow spider, with the red and black coloring. I also wanted to incorporate a few iconic desert/western creatures - the rattlesnake, the scorpion, and the beetle to name a few.
On the 3D side of things, my hand in creating assets was limited. I did not want to take content and opportunities away from my artists, as this was their chance to create assets on a "shippable" level of quality. I only created things that they didn't otherwise have time to do.
I handled the highpoly and game-res version for this smaller enemy - the Grub - while my creature artist worked diligently on the larger enemy Crawler, the Soldier.
As the Art Lead, I was also very aware of what was happening on the LD side in terms of environment. This was a huge complication for the artists, as the game designer had the Level design team create four different versions of the terrain throughout development, and didn't settle on one location until it was a necessity. This pushed our work on the environment side back by a lot, but thankfully we were able to successfully get the terrain implemented, thanks for the hard work and efforts of Alex Kennedy.
Early Environment [Early Alpha]
I had a large hand in set-dressing each section of the overall environment, as I wanted to make sure that every asset was placed in a visually pleasing manner. It was a bit of a challenge, as LDs were crunching up until the very end and operated in level streams - only one person could check out streams at a time. Because of this, artists underwent a lot of waterfall, as we didn't want to impede on the Level designers work since they needed it more than we did. Granted, it was still a little nerve-wracking to wait so long to finalize set-dressing.
This is the Vertical Slice beauty corner that I set up and re-iterated on during production. I had to ensure that it didn't get changed or messed up without my knowledge, as this is the first thing players see after finishing the tutorial section.
I was also in charge of exploring different HUD layouts that would convey all of the information that was necessary to the player, without overwhelming the screen space or being too difficult to find. The game designer had wanted some of the icons to be integrated into the actual dashboard, but I made a point that the texture space and placement of the mech dashboard on the screen didn't have enough space for these things to be easily seen by players.
This was the second, and final, iteration of the HUD layout. I was a bit unhappy with how the programmers placed the camera, and despite my requests to move the FOV backwards, it didn't happen. The result was a more cramped dashboard that cut off a lot of important details and made the player feel like they were standing over the dashboard, instead of sitting at it.
MARKETING
For marketing, my artists Erick Rodriguez and Alex Kennedy handled most of it. Alex created the poster(s) for the game, while Erick created the T-Shirt design for our team. My job was to create the trailer, as I had the most experience with video software and editing.
I took a good amount of inspiration from the Red Dead Redemption 2 Trailer, as I really liked the slow buildup from peaceful to tense, fast-paced action. I felt that it mimicked the overall vibe of our game, although on a much more cartoon-y level.
PROJECT POST-MORTEM
WHAT WENT WELL:
- Solidarity between the artists and myself during production
- Artists were able to finish all of their production tasks early thanks to us voicing our scope concerns early on
- Marketing materials were done very well
- Communication between the Art team and level designers with the Art Lead
- For me, having been a developer on the prior game (Go-Go Karts), I had a better understanding of what information the developer side of the team would find useful
- For me, my overall inclination to help my art team however I could
- My ability to receive feedback from my teammates (on my performance as lead) and implement changes as necessary to create a better team environment for my artists
WHAT WENT WRONG:
- SCOPE!!! The scope was horrendously large
- Lack of leadership from some of the other leads
- Disregard of scope concerns from 2/3 of the dev team by the game designer
- Lack of intent to address scope concerns by the GD until it was too late
- Poor communication to artists from others in regards to changing/tweaking animations
- SDs went hog-wild with changing animations using code without consulting any of the artists
- The environment.
- Level designers were constantly overworked and were in a constant state of crunch
- Programmers suffered long hours trying to get the overall AI system to actually work
EVEN BETTER IF:
- The same leads from Go-Go Karts did not have the experience of working directly with teammates doing actual dev work - they would've benefited from being a developer, instead of a lead again
- Game designer actually listened and respected the concerns regarding scope, instead of brushing them off and thinking we could just recycle assets
- Integration and communication between disciplines
- Organization and transparency from the game designer to the team - some information was not disbursed
- COMMUNICATION - some leads wanted to keep vital information from the team even if it was important and relevant to those devs
- Producer could've been much more assertive - very passive