Acts of Kindness

Month long four person team project - Unity, Maya

Responsible for art direction, production, all modeling, set-dressing, and level sequencing, and initial concept art.

Acts of Kindness was created by Serenity Forge.

Acts of Kindness was a five week long project with a four person team. The goal of the project was to bring more cohesion to a newly expanded art team. As an art director and producer for this game, it gave me insight into how better to assign and schedule tasks to facilitate productivity in my new teammates.

For this project, I organized the month long production schedule, making sure that team members stayed on task, and adjusting the tasks and schedules as unforseeable problems arose. I also did all of the modeling and set-dressing in the game. I was also responsible for designing and sequencing the events of each level using tools created by the programmer. I created the initial concept art upon which the style of the game was based. I also participated in the story development, and was responsible for the art direction of the game.

We developed this 'puppet theater' aesthetic for our project primarily due to time constraints. We wanted to make all of our aesthetic choices make sense thematically, but take very little time to accomplish. A 2d sidescrolling presentation of the game allowed us cut several corners when modeling at texturing. The 'stage' aspect allowed us to cut down on how many models we would need to communicate a scene. We could also be conservative with the detail of the models and textures because they are communicated as stage props. It also allowed us to easily 'switch acts' without too much behind the scenes rig-a-ma-roll. Using manequins for our characters also allowed us to save time on the modeling and animation aspects of the various characters. With each character also using the same UV map, it was very easy to iterate on characters to create as many as we needed.