Most people have heard the term “the butterfly effect” before, but what if it was taken literally? In Natural Disaster, you get to play as a butterfly causing as much havoc as possible! Start fights, commit crimes, and of course, bring disaster upon the world! A cute, 3D game with twisting and interlocking stories for the player to explore and manipulate to their desires.
With my background in 3D modeling and texturing, I quickly became one of the main technical artists on the team. While our other lead focused on VFX, I took on the job of working on the models. Each week, we would have our scrum meetings with the whole team and the artists to figure out what needed to be done and improved upon. Once we got our groove, we started making crazy progress! We were pumping out assets left and right, and we even got to teach each other different skills. I got to show a few of my teammates how to UV map, some learned how to 3D model for the first time, and I even got to learn more about VFX. I genuinely loved working on this game so much and am so proud of my team for the amount we accomplished.
With the game having a pretty simplistic, cartoony style to it, I was able to whip out models pretty quickly. Since I was already handling texturing and UV mapping as well, I was able to get most of the models I created fully game ready in one fell swoop! It was a ton of fun being able to just check off multiple items that needed to be done at once and get them in the game so quickly. This also made it so I was able to focus on the bigger parts of the project more and tackle multiple assets at once with varying levels of detail.
Although I made many of my own models from scratch, I also had to work on other’s. Unfortunately, we had many large and important models with geometrical issues. I have to completely retopoligize the butterfly model when I first got it to texture in since the original was nearly impossible to work with in terms of UV mapping. Many other large models such as the booths and pinball machines also had issues with holes, overlapping faces, floating vertices, and super complicated UV maps.
Luckily, I love working with UV maps and visual geometry and was able to become the official model QA of the team. I spent a good chunk of my time completely starting or redoing UV maps after fixing the models, which also made it easier for me to texture since I already knew the map’s layout. I had so much fun being able to work through these models and fix their geometry, as I have a secret love for math along with art. It was the first time I also got to work with other people's assets and be able to combine our skills to improve upon them. This experience on the team really solidified just how passionate I am for embracing both the creative and technical side of digital art.
As the main texturing artist for the game, I got to work on a variety of different sized projects. I did quite a bit of simple texturing smaller models, but also spent a majority of my time working on a few larger items. My biggest responsibilities consisted of texturing the butterfly and pinball machines, along with editing some of the larger assets. I had to create multiple skins for some of these assets and ensure that they looked good in game with the artstyle, so they took a lot of time and testing.
For the butterfly, we wanted to have a multitude of skins ready for the player to unlock with the different achievements. Each one was related to a different path's themes and events after completion, so I had to make sure to work with the designers to figure out what those paths consisted of. I had so much fun taking creative freedom in the skins and being able to collaborate with the other designers and artists on ideas!
As for the pinball machines, I’d say this was my biggest project of the game. When we were deciding what to make them look like, we knew we had to keep them in theme with the style and time period of the game. However, there was a special surprise I had in store. Since there were seven other games being worked on by other teams at the time, I decided to take inspiration from them to create a fun little reference to each one in our game.
For every pinball machine we had, I made a unique texture for each of the other team’s games. This was by far one of the most fun I’ve had with a project, as I was able to reveal the surprise to everyone at once. For each machine, I made a themed game board for the actual pinball part, then used each team’s title-card with a matching background for the name of each game. It was so fun making these, and even more in showcasing them! A few of the teams also had references to the other games in theirs, but none quite as drastic and that included all of them. Even now I still remember the excitement my team shared in presenting this easter egg to everyone.