Citadel

Citadel a Roguelike utilizing clicker elements for its player progressions system. Upgrade your mines to increase gold flow, spend gold in the camp to empower your character, and enter the castle to defeat the evil entity that has claimed the castle as its home.

Citadel was a 14 week student project with no pre-production period. This development period included the creation of the Game Design Document, creation of the AGILE development board, allocation of job assignments, and approval of completed work.

Original Concept Art

Original Concept Art

Redesigns based on the initial concept art

Redesigns based on the initial concept art

First look at the seraph in a 3d space

First look at the seraph in a 3d space

Early texture work. Eyes added to the wings in texture to keep poly count low.

Early texture work. Eyes added to the wings in texture to keep poly count low.

Finalized textures. Color added to the wings to make the extra eyes pop.

Finalized textures. Color added to the wings to make the extra eyes pop.

Idle motion for the Seraph. Eye twitching was a fantastic addition.

Idle motion for the Seraph. Eye twitching was a fantastic addition.

Seraph death animation. A personal highlight for me is its eye closing after it lands.

Seraph death animation. A personal highlight for me is its eye closing after it lands.

Seraph

The seraph is a large, flying eyeball that roams around the castle. The Seraph was my favorite of the common enemies that we created as a team thanks to its unique nature and its incredible animations.

When shown the first selection of concept art, the second variation stood out to me. After some direction, our concept artist was able to come up with the final version. Passing the concept art to our character modeler we were able to get our hands on the base model very quickly. Sitting in with my modeler and animator we came to the conclusion that the eye being able to move was critical and we passed that along to the rigging phase.

Initial textures for the Seraph had more simple wings. Noticing that it felt like it was missing some personality in that part of its design I asked our texture artist to paint eyes onto the UVs for the wings so that we could have that extra bit of detail.

Animations were tough to get brought in due to the non-humanoid nature. I personally took responsibility for it to save time for the rest of my team. While we weren’t able to have the base model adapt to the specific animations we wanted, I was able to find a work around by having individual animations act as the base itself, turning off the renderer of any particular animated model when it wasn’t in use.

Squiggmar

Squiggmar is the premier boss for Citadel in this MVP. Squiggmar’s is meant to have a grotesque appearance that feels almost other worldly (especially in comparison to the more common enemies in this castle). Because Squiggmar was meant to be such a large piece of the game, it felt important to make sure that we could get to work on it early on. This meant making sure that there was a placeholder version for programmers to be able to work with early on in development.

Initial mix and match concept art for Squiggmar and his tentacles.

Initial mix and match concept art for Squiggmar and his tentacles.

Early rough model for Squiggmar.

Early rough model for Squiggmar.

Rigged skeleton for Squiggmar. Do squids have skeletons?

Rigged skeleton for Squiggmar. Do squids have skeletons?

Squiggmar idle. Eye twitching and scanning inspired from Seraph.

Squiggmar idle. Eye twitching and scanning inspired from Seraph.

Squiggmar death animation.

Squiggmar death animation.

Squiggmar tentacle animation during combat.

Squiggmar tentacle animation during combat.

First particle effect created. The inner part of the fireball and the wall of flames were 3D models with the smoke and flames coming off of them being my effects.
Poison gas explosion for the Pox spell.
Invulnerability indicator.
The last particle effect that I worked on for this project. I love the way that this came out and know that I can use this as a base for plenty of future projects.

Particle Effects

Particle effects can be a huge necessity for making the appropriate game feel. There is only so much that we can get away with on modeling alone and particle effects can very easily add large amounts of visual clarity. Fire, poison gas, balls of electricity, these are all things that would be a nightmare to try to make look good from traditional modeling. Using particle effects allows us to get more from less.

I had to learn a lot about particle effects for this project. Not a single person on my team had any real experience on it; so I made sure to take it up as my responsibility. I am extremely pleased with how the particle effects ended up in our game (especially the electrical ball).