Cansu Aydin
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This is a project I started as part of my Master's thesis at TH Köln, alongside a research paper on cozy gaming subculture.
Felicette is a cozy exploration game playing in a vast cosmic environment with whimsical elements. The player is intended to be an Astronaut cat with her partner Emily the human on a galactic journey.
I have currently put this project on hold but below are some work-in-progress files of UI/UX mock-ups, concept art, some artistic explorations as well as in-game art and early prototypes of functions like player movement, character customization, dialogue and the main photo-taking mechanic.
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After visiting Berlin's Natural History Museum I got inspired to try my hand at creating a procedural fossil fish material based on a photo I took there.
I started with quickly creating the single spline segment using the Spline Poly Quadratic node that lets you create a spline by choosing its points and adjusting the spline curve. I wrote a more detailed blog post about this in my ArtStation blog as well as Medium account.
For the future of this project I want to work on creating a fossil generator material out of an alpha and create a fossil animals texture library, and create a small showcase environment resembling a museum corner. Below is a test render of the dragon fly fossil I'm working on and the height map it's generated from.
While working on the project mentioned above, Felicette, I noticed difficulties with iterative terrain building in Unity. The terrain stamping tool, while convenient compared to traditional sculpting, it still lacks in terms of being able to quickly iterate the terrain over the course of designing and developing a game project.
Inspired by similar workflows of Abzu and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, I started working on building my custom non-destructive terrain tool. It works by procedurally drawing on the height map of the terrain according to user input of placement, shape, height properties and so on.
This is an ongoing project, I want to add a spline feature to draw the terrain along a spline, add a biomes feature to automate texturing the terrain, as well as improve the user interface and experience.
This project started as a prototype for building a terrarium simulation game where the player first builds a terrarium of their choice and places it in a room, then the fun part of having a creature collection would begin with geckos and other cute reptiles. I started it by building the base skeleton of the terrarium as a procedural mesh according to player input, and optimized it for mobile.
As a short and quick project, I experimented with the open source software; Material Maker to create procedural shapes from scratch and animate them.
