Stay Fast
Dec 2023 - Feb 2024
tools used:
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Unity
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Maya
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Aseprite
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Git
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Trello
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Miro
what did i do??
my role: game designer/artist
game design
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core idea
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early on, we had to establish a core gameplay loop and mechanics. due to our development time being only around 2 months, we aimed to make something quite small and concise, but also replayable.
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together we decided on a Mario Kart-like racing game stylized like Star Wars pod-racing.
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narrative
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we wrote some narrative, deciding on a frozen world that would freeze your vehicle over time if you slowed down. this is where our core loop was developed as we needed a way for players to fight back against the freezing: drifting. drifting would build boost and the boost would speed you up; therefore, thawing ice buildup on your vehicle.
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I also wrote a worldbuilding doc and a script; however, most of it ended up being out of scope and never made it in. the dialogue i wrote made it in though and sets up the goal of the game!
art
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as one of the two artists on the project, i did about half of the art in the game including 2D and 3D assets.
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first, we had to settle on an art direction, this is when we created a mood board mostly taking inspiration from blade runner, star wars, f-zero, and other sci-fi media.
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we then split assets between us. i made concept art, character portraits, some ui, some billboard graphics, miscellaneous environment assets, some buildings, and some of the vehicles.
new things i learnt!
pixel art
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before this project i had nearly no experience with pixel art and so using Aseprite to create 2D assets for the game was very fun and rewarding!
3D asset creation
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i used Maya to create many of the 3D assets found within the game such as buildings and vehicles. this was an all new experience for me and helped me learn the 3D art pipeline all the way from concept art, modelling software, and finally into engine.
in-engine development
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since this was my first ever game, i learned quite a few things about navigating around the Unity game engine, specifically with proper implementation of art assets.
takeaways/post-mortem!
after graduating from my program at Vancouver Film School, they held an award show of sorts. we were lucky enough to receive the award for best team project game for Stay Fast. this was really exciting and brought us all even closer together as a team!:D
post-mortem
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although i am proud of Stay Fast for being my first game project, i did learn quite a lot from elements i would consider sub-par.
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we did not put much emphasis on sound design, leaving it until last minute. as a result, the sfx are really unbearable to be honest. this taught me to always consider a plan for all tasks, doing them incrementally throughout development instead of leaving things until last minute.
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another element i learned from was playtesting. we had many developer playtests which were useful for hypothesizing design and learning the game; however, we didn't host nearly enough non-dev playtests. this led to us not realizing how confusing the track was for players until it was too late. this meant we had to do very last minute fixes to direct players (ex. brightly lit billboards). from this i learned the importance of fresh-eye playtesting throughout development, as developers can become blind to many issues over time.
