Gameartopia is a Virtual Playable Catalog about the Game Art subgenre, made by Arsgames
This is my first commisioned videogame and also my first serious godot project.
There were two basic premises for the assignment:
- To create a nice walk simulator that allows to visit the art pieces that make up the exhibition.
- To do with a 2 months budget and no crunch allowed :)
Game Logic: Looking for some code
In a first part I check around the Godot Demo Projects to find examples that serve to my purpose, some logic for a first person view walking simulator: I studied the code of some demo projects, like ‘Joypads’, ‘3D Viewport Scaling’, ‘Multiple Resolutions and Aspect Ratios’.
Also looked into Godot Asset Library, specially the First Person Controller 1.3 from Whimfoome and the Virtual Joystick implementation by MarcoFazio, which I have mixed and modified for my intentions.
After a few weeks I have a running demo working both in desktop and browser. I spend some more time learning about Godot custom resources (in the 3.5 version) to design the implementation of the cards deck. So I have a json info with the cards and godot generates all the different objects procedurally. I also define a basic inventory system.
Palettes: The colored chapters idea
As the exhibition is divided in four main ideas, Luca and I began to create a mental map to bring together all the brainstorming ideas, including 3d models, color ideas, visual effect shaders and inspirational images. We work this mind map with Penpot, which is a great collaboration design tool.
From this started by selecting some palettes to work as colorscapes. Then I merged this palettes into one single armonic palette who includes the other four.
For this part I used mainly the Lospec palette list for inspiration and the DawnBringer Palette Analysis which is an spectacular piece of color visualization that helps to check your palettes in a ‘holistic perspective’ of color relations.
Art direction: Looking for commons
I searched into sketchfab Cultural Heritage and History archive, looking for some archeological scenery that helps me to fill some space in the game level. Some ancient Iberic places, like a roman theater(Clunia) and a medieval town(Besalú), mixed with an ancient maya city(Tulum), in the surrounds of a big mexican volcano(Popocatépetl). Seems like we have some interesting places to explore.
The music was find in pixabay and for the audio effects we used rfxgen by Raylib.
Final elements: Color palettes are made to be used
Once received the card designs, I applied some color conversions to put all the colors into my palette, by using imagemagick and some simple scripts.
Also created some sprite effects to help find the cards and remapped this with my selected color palettes. I used Fluid FX from codemanu to build this beautiful splashes.
Other pieces of code i used
I also had to mention the Waterways addon from Arnklit. It’s a nice tool to simulate rivers. And of course, gimp, blender, inkscape, and gpick.
Finally
Once I have all the elements, I spend a few more weeks fighting against the code with some problems, like shaders breaking the menu interaction, some particles optimization and testing in old computers to try reduce the minimum specifications needed to run the game.
And that’s it. A little game made thanks to the shared knowledge from the Godot community and also thanks to the free licenses culture. Hope you find a nice time collecting all the cards in the Gameartopia island.
