Seek: Find your Friends
Using the accelerometer, Seek gives the player an immersive first person view via a ‘window to the world’ to find their friends. With each friend found, a new perception is unlocked, allowing player to further explore the island and it's secrets.
My roles were:
- Designing and crafting the island
- Defining the art style and modelling environment assets
- Animating the characters
- Producing marketing art
Created as part of the Dare to be Digital competition. Built in UE4.
Overview
Studio
Five Pixels
Role
Animator & Artist
Platform
Mobile
Date
2014
Key Skills
Level Design
Animation
3D Art
Accolades
Seek won several awards,
- Dare's ‘Artistic Achievement Award 2014’ sponsored by The Foundry
- TIGA's ‘Best Student Game 2014’ award
- BAFTA Scotland's 'New Talent Game Award 2015'
Was featured by multiple outlets,
Seek was showcased:
- At EGX on Epic Games Standout Indie Game booth 2014
- On the Unreal Engine website
- On the App Store under ‘Best New Game’
- On the side of Unreal Engine's 2014 GDC booth
- And in Edge magazine
And had over 110,000 downloads on the App store.
Environment Design
I played with height to give players intrigue.
The first island design we had was flat, large, and not very exciting to explore.
I redesigned the island to be much smaller, but have multiple height layers which interconnected. Being able to choose between multiple paths made the space feel more engaging for players, and the "hide and reveal" along the routes contributed to making the space feel larger than it was.
The large mountain acted as a "weenie", providing a point of orientation as players moved around the island.
Senses informed the world's design.
The history sense reverted elements in the environment to their unbroken state. I used this to add new paths to discover in areas players were already familiar with.
The sound sense let players see in the dark through an echolocation like pulse. Instead of building an underground cave system, I placed the dark section at the entrance of the mountain, acting as a natural gate where player's couldn't progress through the mountain until they'd found the sound child.
I kept the textures clean.
Early art tests had more details in the texturing of the environment, but on a small mobile screen this proved to be too busy.
Instead, I pivoted to an art style which applied colour mainly through UV sets, using the edge loops of the geometry to keep clean defined edges.
This had the added bonus of reducing our texture sizes and keeping the application package small, as most textures were only 16 pixels square.
Animation
I added charm to our characters.
Through their idle animations.
Marketing
I produced promotional assets.
Including splashscreens, business cards, social media assets, app/play store assets, event posters, and creating the 2D section of the trailer.
