Heading Home
The second project of Futuregames became a platformer with narrative elements. You take the role of the intact head of a trashed robot. Crashed on an unfamiliar planet, it has to find it’s way back home again.
Role: VFX
Duration: 4 weeks
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Bounce Pad
Despite being just a head, the main character is luckily equipped with a bounce pad launcher which allows for fun and quick traversal of the environment. Making it feel good took some trial and error but ultimately went down to the timing and size of the effect.
Magnet Beam
The second tool to traverse the environment is the magnet beam. Aim at any surface and it will attachand attract the player towards it. Some areas of the game requires the player to combine both the magnet and the bounce pad, leading to interesting synergies.
Face Switch Material
Something had to be done about giving the protagonist some emotion. I created a dynamic material with a flipbook texture containing the facial expressions. It could be feeded with corresponding frame numbers to control which face to show. It made the game have a lighthearted feeling, even when falling to your death.
Aurora
The skybox features large ribbons of aurora. They consist of very large flat mesh cards with an animated material. There’s also some vertex offset going on making them slowly wave. I modeled the meshes in Maya and made the textures Substance Designer.