Games Proposal - Stray - Week 4
Updated: Apr 30
Week 4 Commencing 17/4/2023
Dust Niagara Particles
I added some dust particles floating in the air where the light hits through the window on the floor, as if it looks like that is where the light is shining through. I wanted to do this to try and add an element of realism and movement to the scene, because I feel like scenes that do have some element of movement really make it feel more alive.
Robot Model Credits: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/stray-robot-8e81e0cd50bf43bfbb52c23183eee552
On Sketchfab, I was able to find a free to use Stray Robot model. I downloaded it and put it into Maya and positioned the individual parts to make it look as though he was slumped over in my stool model.
Unfortunately, this model had a lot of N-gons and way too many polygons in general - so I had to do some retopologising and remeshing myself on this model, just to salvage parts of it for my scene.
I will most likely not include screenshots that include this robot model onto my final showcases that I post online, like on Artstation, just because it feels wrong to show off as it is not my model.
However, for the sake of communicating my ideas and design choices, I was happy to get the robot in my scene, given that the questline that the robot gives the player is a very big part of my environment proposal.
With the robot now added in my UE5 scene, I was able to get some screenshots of him and also made some mock-up dialogue screenshots, referencing in-game dialogue. Below, I made a video to showcase this:
And here are the individual photos for each dialogue phase that I used in the video:
I tried to make the dialogue match ones in the game, while also trying to give Claude his own personality too.
I also made the most important parts of the text yellow to make it clearer to the player, as the game also does this:
I also got some feedback this week from my lecturer to add some more canvasses, paintings, and paint buckets around the scene to make it read more as a painter's studio. Above is the quick sketch she drew for me to illustrate her ideas, with the main idea being to add the bulk of the additions on the back walls.
This is how the scene looks now with the new additions.
Originally, I was hesitant to add more paint buckets to the scene to bulk it up, because I felt like the addition of more paint buckets would confuse the player as the paint buckets already in the scene are the main collectibles/mechanic of the area - being that the player has to collect certain ones. I was scared that the player could ultimately get confused on which paint buckets were the ones they were meant to collect and bring back, and which ones were meant for set decoration.
However, I still wanted to implement this feedback, so I tried to make noticable differences in the paint buckets. On the left is one of the collectible ones for the main mission, which is smaller and has a strip of the corresponding colour in the middle. On the right are some of the paint buckets I made for set dressing, which were modelled to be a little bit larger than the previous, and the textures have a lot more wear on them, with them being quite dusty. They also do not have any colour on the outside.
Level Design Document
Above, I also put together an LDD to explain the main points of my scene and how the player would interact with it, were it to actually be within the world of Stray.
Showcase Sheets
I also made some showcase sheets to show the assets I made for the scene in a more neutral lighting so that they could be seen more clearly. I tried to do them within the same style of asset sheets that artists have made for their own assets in Stray that I touched on in an earlier blog post, like so:
Though, I made sure to include that mine was fan art because I felt iffy about potentially posting it online later on for my portfolio without making it obvious that it was intended as my own creation inspired by the game.
Project Showreel!
In the end, this is how the project schedule spreadsheet tracker looked.