Cornwall Council Project | Art & Visuals Development Blog

Production

In part 1 of the development blog, I went through all the different challenges we had faced in the pre production of the game, discussing the various GDDs and ideas that were being thrown around, and the response to the initial prototypes of the games.

By the end of the third week, everyone in the group had come to a mutual understanding of what the game was supposed to be, and production had finally took off.

3D Art

Since we only had one artist in the group, it was turning into a bottleneck, and we weren’t able to keep up with the timeline. So to help speed things up, I started to help with making the art.

The Map

Our artist, Denae, had pulled this incredibly accurate 3D model of Cornwall, which ended up being really helpful, but at the time, visually it didn’t look interesting enough for a children’s game, since it look to similar to a google maps satellite image of Cornwall.

Fig. 1: Satellite image of Cornwall

To make things look interesting, I decided to pass the texture of the map through a GIMP filter (since I don’t have Photoshop), that makes everything a little pixelated and shifted, providing a painterly look to the map of Cornwall.

Fig. 2: Stylised base color map used in the final game

The waves

While I was visiting the Falmouth Art Gallery in the library, I came across this beautiful moving sculpture of waves, and was wondering if I could implement the same in the game as well.

Fig. 3: The waves moving sculpture in Falmouth Art Gallery

This was pretty simple stuff: an instance of a cube with 2 rotation keyframes, replicated in a grid with some timing offset.

Fig. 4: Animated waves in Maya

To save on performance, this was recorded from the top, and used as a texture in Unity.

Fig. 5: Recorded texture to be used in Unity

Some other models

I also contributed some other 3D models to contribute to the look and feel of the RTS scene, and to provide assets for the NHS scene:

Fig. 6: 3D models of Pendennis Castle, Falmouth Maritime museum

Fig. 7: 3D models of St. Micheals Castle

Fig. 8: 3D model of Truro Cathedral

Fig. 9: 3D models of Barbara Hepworth museum and Tate in St. Ives

Fig. 10: 3D models for the NHS scene in the game

Final Look

This is what the two scenes look like in the game now:

Fig. 11: Screenshot of the NHS game from the Unity build

Fig. 12: Screenshot of the Map from the Unity build

Game Logo

I was talking to a close friend in Graphic Design when she told me about the Chough, and how after 50 years, they were finally returning back to Cornwall, and I thought about how this fits in so perfectly with the idea of resilience.

Upon researching I found out that the chough was everywhere in the UK. So many emblems and badges use the chough.

Fig. 13: Falmouth Univeristy’s coat of arms, which features a Chough holding a paintbrush, a quill and a pencil

I asked if she could make me rough sketches of a logo since as a graphic designer, she would be more experienced with the composition rules and Gestalt principles of making a logo, so she provided me with these:

Fig. 14: Rough sketches of the logo

The team loved them, and after asking Denae to flesh it out, we finally got our logo

Fig. 15: Final Logo for Gallos Kernow

Tutorial sheets

Another big contribution I had to this project was to make the tutorial sheets for all the different games. The tutorial sheets were designed to be extremely simple and easy to understand, and use the chough mascot to make them child friendly.

Fig. 16: RTS tutorial sheet

Fig. 17: Fire mini game tutorial sheet

Fig. 18: NHS mini game tutorial sheet