Mirrors of Grimaldi is my Senior Project and the first fully fledged game I have worked on with the goal of release. We have been working on the game design since summer of 2015, and on full production since September 2015 as a team of 8. I’m the Art Director on the project. I spent a lot of time coordinating between the art and programming sides of the team in addition to working on game design, modeling, texturing, animation, environment set up, particle effects, UI design, and art implementation in Unity. In particular, I was heavily involved with the design of the splitscreen, combat, and tower systems. Download now on itch!
Game Information
Mirrors of Grimaldi is a local multiplayer game, that takes the aspect of splitscreen multiplayer, and does something never seen before! Our splitscreens are dynamic, and represent your character’s health in relation to the other players’. This means that when a player takes damage, a portion of their screen is taken away, and then equally redistributed to the other players. Splitscreen is at the forefront of Mirrors of Grimaldi and how players interact with our dynamically changing splitscreen will determine who is victorious in this competitive multiplayer experience. The player’s main weapon is the ability to punch enemy minions into opposing players’ screens, who will then target and attack your opponents instead of you. With thrilling and strategic gameplay, Mirrors of Grimaldi brings a fresh new face to local multiplayer that will keep hardcore and casual gamers alike asking for another rematch.
For a more in-depth look at the game, our dev blog, and a link to the version released to itch.io, please go to our game’s website:
Our game was awarded 1st prize in Gameplay at the 2016 Intel University Game Showcase!
Check out Intel’s coverage here!
Some of My Art Contributions
The Guard Texturing
I did the texturing for our Guard enemy type in Substance Painter. The model was made by Alison Friedlander from concept art by Steven Yaffe.
The Tower Model and Animations
I took the Tower asset that provides players with abilities to use against fellow players from concept art to animation. I did the concept art in Photoshop, made the model in Maya, and did the animations and blendshapes in Maya as well. Steven Yaffe did the texturing. I also brought the model, animations, effects, and textures into Unity.
Environment Toolkit
One of my duties as art director was to figure out the pipeline for modeling and texturing our environment. Our environment, save for a few custom elements like the Church that I made above, is all made of small pieces of the Environment Toolkit I set up that can be used repeatedly to build a town with each house being unique. In addition to laying out how the toolkit would work I also contributed modeling and texturing to the toolkit. Alison Friedlander and Pat Bastian also contributed modeling and texturing to the toolkit.
Since we render 4 cameras at once optimization is extremely important for the game. I put together the texture atlasing and UV sets for all of our environment pieces so that the whole thing uses only 4 materials. Tom Trahey developed the pipeline that I used to do the final lighting and AO for the environment. The video above shows the town in 4 stages of completion. The video starts with the environment fully realized, the lighting is then turned off, followed by the texturing, and then the AO to leave only the models.