TOGETHER OUT

DEPA 2022 ACTION GAME AWARD

2019 ~ 2023 ( ~4 years in development ) release date : TBA

This is the project that stems from the National Software Contest or NSC award game called The Adventure of Khaoneeo & Mamuang, which caught the eye of the director of Quantumpeak and got funded, which was then later developed by seven students in Innovative Digital & Design, Thammasat University. Currently, the original development team has been disbanded, and Quantumpeak Studio now owns the project.

Game trailer video

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Credit to a very good team member :

Niti Thammarerkrit ( Nick ) - A a co-founder, designer, project manager, director, and fighter.
Ratchanon Prapassornpong ( Poom ) - A solo programmer, responsible, and an excellent co-worker.
Kirana Ranburana ( PingPing ) - An animator, pixelated texture artist, animator, and superb generalist
Phattranit Srisawad ( Bow ) - A concept artist, texture artist, storyboard artist, and fighter alongside Nick.
Napasorn Kulsakvimol ( Aim ) - A storyboard artist, animator, and a fast boi hard-worker.
Massarin Pathompongpan ( notlazeon ) - A creative character designer, visual dev, and supporter during a hard time.
Peraya Vutidechkan ( Saeng ) - A project manager that come later to help us with so many things, including productions in some scene.
Jumpz - A former project manager who helped us band together in the first two years

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS & TOOLS

It's messy, as expected; pre-production is happening alongside production since this is the first time we've developed a full-release game. Many things are to be considered, such as optimization, art pipeline, particle effects, animation, environment, and things that can't be swept under the rug anymore.

I end up doing lots of things that are typically, in the game production, would be assigned to multiple people, including making 3D assets, scene dressing, lighting, art assets pipeline, animations, particle effects, texture, R&D, optimization, and presenting progress to the manager, etc. I can't practically call myself a technical artist in this project. I don't know what this is called, and I'm so tired. This is what I recall doing :

Tools

Unity
- Manage art assets pipeline in the engine
- Scene management, including art assets arrangement, lighting settings, and post-processing
- Lighting, including prepare 3D assets for light baking and in-scene lighting
- Troubleshoot and diagnose any visual problems such as light leak from lightmap, collision and meshes are not aligned, looking through Profiler addressing problems causing lag spike, etc.
- Making Particle Effects ( Shuriken )
- Animation including design pose, creating pixelated key animations and in-between ( in some part before delegation )
Photoshop
- Create optimized texture for 3D assets
- Create concept art
- Create a pixelated animation and sprite sheet
Blender
- Create optimized 3D assets and scene dressing
Miro
- Art assets lists
- Work delegation
- Animation planning

Concept Art & Design

Since the original project started from me, I had to create most of the original concept art to convey the direction of the overall art style. With the help of Nick's co-directing, I designed most of the essential concept art, story, and world setting to keep the project starting. Sometimes, I'll come back to do concept art if there's no one available since these works are essential to help with work delegation and environment dressing.

Some of the concept art I did for the game

I also had to design a pixelated version of each character that will be used as assets in the game for the main characters June and May; there are many iterations before we can conclude the final version that we currently use in the game. There are multiple things to consider, such as

Is the number of pixels enough to animate but also convey the feeling as it's pixelated on the screen when playing?
Is the amount of contrast between colors enough to display clarity when playing?

As these examples are things I've considered, there are a lot more guidelines to this, but this will be more of a tutorial than an explanation. Most of them are iterations that change after some playtesting and R&D.

multiple iterations of pixelated design

3D Environment Assets and Textures

Following the making of 3D assets for game engine guidelines, nothing is special except that many 3D environments consist of just textures and quads, just for the purpose of mimicking 2.5D-ish art style. So we can kind of stop worrying about triangle counts from this art style approach. The hardest part is making it tasteful; this technique is easy, but making it look good in every angle is tricky. The downside is that this game art style heavily relies on lighting, so if lighting is terrible, so is the environment.

Please, god of Lightmap, please baked as I envision you would baked

Me praying to Unity everytime I pressed the bake button

Comparison of no lighting and with lighting

To reduce drawcalls, I must assemble meshes into chunks. This process required me to go back and forth between Blender and Unity.

I assemble chunks of modular assets before importing to Unity to reduce drawcalls

This is some of the screenshot

I used a general approach for the texturing part by creating an optimized size atlas texture that will be lightweight when imported into the game engine. Also, almost all environments in this game consist of an atlas texture, which reduces drawcalls and makes it easier to dress each modular model into the environment.

These are example of pixelated textures made by Pingping and me. As seen in these textures contain multiple objects (atlas) to reduce drawcalls.

Small size boi when imported to engine

Animations

Every animated character in this game is animated on a quad by using the flipbook technique. I use a quad because I want to mimic realistic shadow that interacts with the atmosphere's real-time lighting ( which is expensive asf I know and probably can be mimicked with shaders instead ). Depending on the complexity of the animations, there can be single quad used per character ( object ) or multiple quads.

Quad(s)

Texture

( Flipbook )

We only use single quads for the main characters, May & June, since the animation isn't complicated. But if the animations started to get complex, such as this stage boss, there are three quads. With this knowledge of 2D Animations & 3D Animations, we can have fun experimenting with the combination of 2D Animations within 3D space.

This boss hand is separated from main body

So, deciding what to have within animated characters depends on various reasons. To prevent changes or problems, I needed to plan how many animations we would have with teammates first by following some of these example guidelines.

Will this character get part-swapped or injured?
Will these character animations within frame bound?
Will animations be using repeatable UVs technique?

After considering some guidelines & planning, I delegated work to Aim to help transcribe this into an animated pixelated version in Photoshop. After Aim did some keyframe, Pingping will take over the in-between.

This is the animation breakdown diagram I planned before delegating work to the animator. Kudos to Aim for doing a really good job transcribing this breakdown to actual animations keyframe in Photoshop.

This is the animation flowchart Poom has made, breaking down animations from Nick's game design how many animations are needed. I later decided on what's required to present these animations visually. Then, I delegated all this work to fellow art team.

Particle Effects

These are some examples of particle effects that I made using Shuriken. In typical situations, I will usually make placeholder particle effects first for testing, just to clarify the specs or amount of art assets required for further completion. Then, I will delegate work to the art team ( usually Bow ). Bow will make spritesheets or help brainstorm ideas most of the time since she can automate some of the effect keyframes using After Effect.

These are some particle effects I've made

Work Delegation

I teach almost all of the primary making art for game production to the art team. Some examples are :

Making Textures for Game Engine
Art Assets specs requirement
Making Pixelated Animation
Making Concept Art

I've used Google Documents with art assets specs and guidelines when delegating work. For Miro, I use it to assemble completed art assets.

Work delegation in Google docs and Miro

My Conclusion ( me ranting ) :

This project has come so far for almost four years of development. It has opened many opportunities for me to develop my skills further and be where I am today. But I can't deny that I worked too hard during my university years, shifting between this project and class assignments, which I spent nearly 60 hours per week for 2-3 years, then I eventually burnt out. There are also a lot of production issues that stem from the inexperience of me and the team.

The game's current production is ready to be built and played, but all the content still needs to be finished. The foundation of this project is already steady enough; with more production time and polishment, this project could be finished.

I wish I had more time to dive into shaders' stuff since I think it'd help a lot with the performance. I'd also be interested in learning and experiencing many more subjects, like game animations or game environments, of which I only scraped the surfaces in this project; I think I can do better. Unfortunately, I have already done a lot, and I can't do shadow clone jutsu like Naruto.

But the reason I got through this situation is because of my team of almost four years; they've been an excellent friend and teammates who have helped me through so many crises. I can't say anything more meaningful than Thank you.

With the Joojee team, @some Izakaya in Tokyo attended TGS. photo taken by P.Jump

won DEPA Acceleration Program category Action game

With Quantumpeak & fallen knight team @TGS

Index