For one of my final projects during my first year at USC, I was tasked with creating a short playable experience in Unity where a character explores a digital environment in order to meet a final goal at the end of the experience. Throughout the game, the player encounters new obstacles and characters, which directly contributes to a narrative arc of the game and an emotional resolution. With a team of two classmates, our final project culminated in our short game, STICKS.
The first two minutes of our game (with sound)
In our short first-person POV game, the player plays as a lost squirrel who must venture across a forest alone in order to reconnect with their family again. During their adventure, they interact with multiple new forest friends that ultimately help guide them in the right direction by teaching them how to creatively persevere in the face of conflict through the core loop of collecting sticks. Our game aimed to tackle on themes of optimism and offered child-friendly suggestions towards nihilism and existentialism, inspired by the themes in the 2023 Academy Award winning film, Everything Everywhere All At Once. At the beginning of the game, the squirrel is hopeless and prepared to give up upon meeting its first obstacle, the river. However, throughout the game, it learns to defeat and overcome each of those obstacles by taking on brighter mindsets inspired by the forest creatures, and ultimately finds his family's home at the end of the game.
Check out some stills from our game below!
Opening
Bird Interaction
River Ride
Beaver Interaction
Combat
Rabbit Interaction
Finale
Throughout this project, each member of our 3-person team contributed to the game's overall design, core mechanics, and narrative. In my own role specifically, I was a 3D Artist, Animator, rigger, as well as the UI Artist. This included multiple of the 3D environmental props and foliage, as well as a couple of the forest characters seen in the game. I also took on the rigging for our human model/character, and created knockback and falling animations that would play when the player took him down. Using my experience from a similar Unity project a year ago, I also helped the engineer on our team in importing the rigged 3D model and animations into Unity properly. Due to the time constraints and limited scope of our project, I also helped source free low-poly 3D assets to assist with our game's set dressing and worldbuilding.
Check out some of my models and animations below!
Tree - v1
Tree - v2
Bush
Beaver
idle
knockback
fall
I also created each of the UI assets for our game, including the title and end screens, dialogue boxes, inventory boxes, and object icons. In these designs, I attempted to round out a cohesive theme for our game, following along the organic, pastel color scheme of our environment. I really enjoy how my assets came out, and I think they helped make the game look more complete (especially for a school project). Check some of them out below!
dialogue box
inventory box
stick
rock
special stick
special rock
title screen
end screen
death screen (not shown in demo)
Overall, this project was really rewarding and valuable to my learning experience, especially as just a short 3-week project. Our final product came out better than I'd expected, and I think a large part of that was due to the brilliant team dynamic that I was lucky enough to have for this project. If we had more time, I would definitely go back and make the game more user-friendly, by including user instructions and/or more UI during the actual gameplay. I also might polish the script and narrative a bit more to be less surface-level. Overall, however, this was a really successful project!
