What’s the life cycle of developing an asset in a video game, you ask? Well, even if you didn’t ask – there’s a lot more detail involved in every little part of a video game. One example of a recent asset we created for our upcoming VR title developed in Unreal Engine, Captain Toonhead: the toilet.
When we talk about an asset, it could be anything – in this instance, we’re talking about a tangible asset that an end-user can interact with within a game. And specifically, we’re talking about a toilet. A critical asset for any person, no?
For us, our process looked like this:
Here are some of the visuals that we had through the steps mentioned above –
Here’s the concept art where we started developing the asset for the game:
Above is an example of how greatly the steps of redoing the textures can affect an asset:
We create videos for several of our assets, here’s one of our overviews – specifically noting the flushing:
Beyond the technical pieces and logistics outlined above, there are always other interesting elements brought in by the art direction team.
For the creation of this asset – we wanted to make it look good and specifically match the style and color palette of the existing game. The blue, in this game, is really important to clearly identify the faction where this asset belongs.
More hilariously, there was at least one meeting internally about the importance of the toilet flushing and which direction it flushed in.
While developing the behaviors of the toilet, we already had a direction from the story of the game. We needed to create some visual effects and animations to have the toilet be interactive by our players, so at one point during a review, we ended up talking about the flushing animation and materials we needed to create, down to the direction of the flushing!
In the end tech art did an animated material that could control flushing direction.
The creation of this single asset within a single game for us took input and help from 3 people and roughly 40 hours, just to give you an idea of how intensive it is to make one seemingly small component of a larger game.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.