I am Here is a narrative driven exploration game focusing on mental health and social change. This project spanned over 2 years and originally was a University brief for The Chinese Room. Since that initial brief we have only added to the game and was picked to be in the finals of D.A.R.E academy by Abertay University. This was a competition to help aid the development of indie games within the university with a total of 14 teams applying for the competition. We made it to the finals with 5 other teams and debuted the game at EGX in Birmingham. This experience alone was great to see how many different personalities react differently with the story line and the gameplay. The competition gave us a great insight into the day to day creation of video games with us spending a month in the same space expanding the game further.
We had a team of 7 comprising of 3 artists, 2 coders and 2 designers with some help from various music students as well. This meant the artist could break down the assets list and work with items they wanted to create. Before I made any of my assets I would create a mood board for the specific item to see the differences in models for example the retro clock, which had many differentiation's.
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These assets were created for the initial portion of the project about a year before we participated in D.A.R.E Academy. For most of the assets the artists would texture their own work but depending on the complexity of the object I would tend to UV map and prepare it for the others since I was the most efficient at this particular task. I did in fact texture all the above assets but wanted to show them outwith Unreal Engine 4.
The assets above are both hero pieces for the player to interact with although, with both assets they interact differently. Karen's writing award is an interactive object that you explore while roaming about the house but its a key point to start an in game silhouette animation projected on the wall. More about this in the 2D section of I am Here. The alarm clock is similar in starting an in game action but it starts the transition to the next level.
Really happy with the end result of I am Here. its was a fantastic and enlightening experience from start to finish. The best part was the flexibility I had during the project and being able to jump between 2D and 3D assets. Although we have all now gone our separate ways we all agreed it was our favorite team project throughout our degree. With funding this game could have been a full 10+ hour experience but the team was equally excited to release it as a demo and see thousands of downloads with loads of positive reviews despite the story line being hard hitting.