Project Scarecrow

Project Scarecrow is a Unity game that I started development on in June with the help of an additional programmer and animator. It can maybe best be described as an adventure game in the style of Chulip or Majora's Mask, but in an episodic format akin to Life is Strange that we hope will allow us to break up development into managable chunks.

Unfortunately, due to our reservations with using Unity following their monetization plan controversy, the project is currently on hiatus while we look into potentially switching development over to Godot.

Below are some of the environments, props, and character models I was working on for our vertical slice prior to the hiatus.

Shopping Center Environment

The first environment we decided to work on was a shopping center with a large parking lot, a bus stop, and a few stores

Initial rough layout

Level blockout in blender

Level geometry finalization

In-game view at bus stop

Level finalization in Unity with materials and props

In-game view in front of the Howdy Halal

Howdy Halal interior

In-game view inside the Howdy Halal

Overview of the various props I made

Walkthrough of the map in-game
(using temporary walk and idle animations I made to test this rig)

Night time lighting + vertex shader moths

Both the clover and dirt patches use a worldspace texture + voronoi noise edge dissolve shader so they can be easily placed around and scaled to break up large areas of grass

Additionally, the stencil buffer is used so dirt patches only appear on grass, meaning custom geometry doesn't need to be made for spots like the one in the video

Characters

These are some of the characters I modeled, accompanied by my very crude concept art for them

For ease of rigging, I separated out the body parts to save time dealing with difficult joints. With a potentially large cast of characters and a small team, this made sense to do, especially when the flat in-game lighting mostly hides it anyway. Additionally, separating the body parts like this allows for fun stuff like the swapping out of hand models, which is very important for when a character needs to do an expressive "Mamma mia!"