Month: January 2023

This week it was time to decide which group to fully commit to and I decided to go with the Cat Kaiju game. Part of what helped my decision is I was able to find someone else who didn’t have a group yet who was interested in the Ghost project so I no longer felt like I had to provide my help to the other group. Once I joined the Cat Kaiju group we had a meeting together to catch me up with what their project consisted of and what was needed from me as a VFX student. We spoke about the game, what systems they wanted implemented, what that meant for me as a modeler as that would be my predominate role and what I needed to research in the coming week. What I would need to research is Cell Fracture exists in Maya in comparison to Blender which is where the feature is from as it pertains to how the buildings will be destroyed in the game. Alongside that is the architecture styles that they would like me to mimic for the buildings I would model.

The styles they wished me to look into are Neo Futurism, Brutalism and the styles of XCOM 2 and Blade Runner. As the games asthetic would be cell-shaded and cartoony as to keep the tone light but ultimately wanted a rich and wealthy upper city represented by the Neo-Futurist aesthetic and poor undercity with the Brutalist aesthethic. XCOM and Blade Runner were given to me as well in order to see how I can maintain a visually ‘sci-fi’ reading for all the buildings as this is a sci-fi game.

This week we had a huge meeting with a lot of the MA students in the canteen to all get together with people that shared our interests and exchange ideas. Despite 25 people having written up their interests in the topic of everyday object to fantastical object only 6 showed up to the meeting. As a result the range of ideas presented wasn’t very large and not many people had a solid foundation for an idea that I wanted to explore as well.

Later on though we were able to roam around and look for other groups that might have ideas that interest us. I was able to come across two groups, one that wished to make a stylized game about a Cat Kaiju, meaning a giant cat that would destroy a city.

The idea is fun and cute and has me interested in working with a stylized approach to modelling and effects which is something I wish to try.

Another group that interests me is a VR game that would use hand tracking to track the play using hand gestures to exorcise ghosts based on East Asian folklore. They were inspired by Ghostwire: Tokyo for the hand gestures which in turn are based on Kuji-Kiri.

As a horror enthusiast and someone who grew up in Singapore with a lot of these ghosts as part of my upbringing it the project does interest me. However as it stands the group that was looking for VFX people still is uncertain about if they will go with this angle and the only thing for certain is that they want a VR game reliant on hand tracking, an example of such a game would be Elixir by Magnopus on the Oculus Quest.

As a result I’ve tentatively gone with the Cat Kaiju game as while it doesn’t interest me as much the team there already has a very solid foundation for their idea. They have an agreed upon premise, they have a style in mind and a clear vision for what they want. As it was very difficult for me to find any groups that weren’t already full or didn’t need a VFX student I am more likely going to go with the Cat Kaiju game as it is the more fleshed out project.

For certain the most difficult part of this week and likely the entire project is getting started. Trying to find a group and something that interests and challenges me is not easy and getting this enormous task underway is incredibly challenging, but if I pace myself and organize my time it is most certainly do-able.

This week was primarily focused on getting an initial idea or topic that we would be interested in. I decided to go with the topic “Everyday object turned into a fantastical one”. With this topic in mind I had two ideas, on a surface level one and another more interesting one.

The surface level idea would be to take an everyday object like a microwave and converting that into a variety of different aesthetic settings like for example Cyberpunk which is a popular aesthetic currently. An example would be this

More interestingly for me would be not altering the object physically but instead create a piece around it that exposes how fantastical some of these everyday things are. For example a phone. An animation or VR experience could be made around how a phone connects us in ways never before possible and exploring that.