I’m participating in Run Jump Dev’s short form work report program–Hurdles. I wrote a little introduction to that program here if you wanna know more!
Introducing myself:
Howdy! My name is James Thomas Lewis II, but you can call me Jamie.
My game pitch:
3 Kids in a Trench Coat is a turn-based, puzzle platformer on mobile about three kids getting into mild mischief while impersonating a 13ft adult in a really, really (really) long coat. You control these 3 cute, kind, clay kids as the jump, and fall to collect rewards and avoid hazards.
My hopes for this round of hurdles:
This round of hurdles, I am focusing on nailing 3 Kids’ claymation aesthetic inside Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline.
I chose to go with a claymation style because:
- It kept with the kind, playful, and cute vibe I wanted.
- It fit well with my round, human-but-not-quite character designs.
- It felt like a good fit for touch screen gaming. As the player would tap on these characters, it would be as if they were posing these lil’ clay buddies themselves.
I was able to achieve this look initially in Blender by following this tutorial by SouthernShotty.
However, it became obvious that there was a lot for me to learn to get this style working in realtime, mobile-friendly engine.
What I want to accomplish next week:
- Do my first round of iterating on my kids’ materials.
- Research lighting darker scenes in Unity.
- Do my first round of iterating on my lighting with what I learned from my research.
Thanks for checking in on my progress! I’ll be posting another one of these next week. I’ll send out a tweet when the blog post goes live. If you don’t already, go ahead and give me a follow on Twitter if you want to receive more frequent updates on 3 Kids in a Trench Coat in addition to some jokes that most people give a C+ or B-.