CRITTER TOWN
Critter Town is a game prototype inspired by Animal Crossing and similar titles, where you live in a town with your animal friends. This game prototype was made during my year long course on game development at HEO as my final project in a team of 4. Development time was about a month.
Most of the graphical assets are made by me, except a few placeholder sprites, some models, and most of the buildings. Programming was all done by my other teammates. Critter Town was made using the Unity engine. Credits for the music used go to Scruffy on Youtube, and his friend rud.
CONCEPT ART
Some character and environment ideas for the game. For the characters and buildings I took inspiration mostly from Animal Crossing, especially Wild World and City Folk, because I was planning on using a very low poly style.
ENVIRONMENTAL ASSETS
A good bunch of the environmental assets in the game I had made previously just for fun, but they got easily repurposed here. I also had to make a lot of new ones, like the trees and the big library/observatory at the top of the map. For the environment, I also drew a bunch of inspiration from the game 'A short hike'.
Most of the assets use the same gradient texture material to save space in the project and memory while loading in the assets. Both kinds of trees have their own materials and so does the library. Since the game is very low poly and simplistic, none of these assets have anything special going on in the normal maps section, nor do they have differences in material properties, except for the one transparent version of the material, used for stuff like windows and water.
I also made four different terrain textures that I applied on blender and exported the whole map as an .fbx to Unity. All are heavily inspired by Animal Crossing.
UI
The UI was made as pixel art to represent a lighthearted indie feel, and all of it was made on Aseprite. The look is simple, as these were meant to be used as placeholders and replaced by something fancier if the game was more polished.
I also made a number of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon inspired portraits for the characters, meant to be shown alongside text to better communicate emotion, but we didn't have enough time to put them in. The buttons in the menu all have idle, hover, and pressed states. I also made a few other animations, namely an exclamation point that was supposed to show up when you catch a fish, and an icon that pops up when you're close to a door, indicating you can press a button to enter the building.
MODELS AND ANIMATIONS
All the character models used in Critter Town I had made beforehand on my own time as a part of my series of low poly, ACGC style character models.
I had rigged them in advance as well, so during this project I just gave them new animations. These include animations for idle, walking and running animations for every character, and for the duck character that acts as our player in the game, throwing a fish pole and reeling it back, and idling while fishing.
Most of the other characters use these same animations as a base, but some of them had to be tweaked individually to better fit the model in question, like adding wing animations to the two moth characters, and changing the frog's run animation to work with his big boots.
