Game Environment Art Assignment

Hi!

We are "interviewing" 3D artists like you by giving them an assignment to make the environment assets to see if they have:

  • Style and taste
  • Technical ability (poly count, topo, uv)
  • Speed
  • Good ideas
  • Communication
  • Takes feedback
  • Overall do we like working together

We are making a multiplayer game platform with hundreds of minigames that last between 10 seconds and a minute. We will eventually have 400 minigames, but in the short term, we are trying to get to 30.

The Game: Sumo

This is a game where 2-8 players are on an arena and the objective is to push everyone else off the ledge and be the last person in the arena. There are bricks surrounding the arena that if they are hit 2 times, they break away, exposing the edge. This game lasts about 10-30 seconds.

Deliverables:

  • The arena
  • The stones (intact, and broken)
  • Flower
  • Clouds
  • Background island
  • Background island 2
  • Anything else that might add to the environment

Overall Aesthetic

We don't have an overall aesthetic defined yet. We want to find the aesthetic by working with artists and come up with something that we like and try to make the look consistent in the future. That being said, we have some high level ideas / direction. The characters in our platform are customized by the players and used in each of the games. The aesthetic for the characters is "designer vinyl toys". We really love vinyl toys like Amiibos, Pop Mart, Kid Robot. What if they were to come alive? So stylistically, we were thinking of PBR: realistic textures, but really cute geometry, cute colors. We think that Party Animals does a pretty good job of this.

For this game, I am thinking that the arena will be an island floating in the sky and there is water far below the islands. Clouds are floating by below the island. In the distance, there are other islands.

All of this said, if you have a different / alternative idea, let us know! Nothing is decided yet.

Form & Geometry

Stylistically, it should be cute and chunky. Avoid superfine details. Nintendo is probably the best reference for level of detail: Mario Party

Polycounts should be the minimum required to sell the idea. We can use normal maps for extra detail where we need it.

Texturing

As said above we are thinking about PBR textures. No flat shading, no cel shading, no inverse hull outlines. It should be a mixture of real life textures and toylike plastics and vinyl with cute colors. Stone, grass, dirt, plastic, glass, cloth, etc.

Avoid over-detailing textures with extra layering. For example, junior artists will overuse adding dirt and rust to everything. This sucks. But sometimes, it's nice.

Scale

Technically: The character is 1.5 units tall. In game terms, 1 unit = 1 meter.

Speed

Our goal is to produce 3-5 games a week. So we need to come up with a workflow pipeline that allows us to produce the art assets we need on a reliable basis.

Tech requirements, Communication and Deliverables

Everything has to be built in Blender as separate blend files. We have a build script that exports glbs automatically.

Ideally, you should texture in Substance Painter.

I'm sure there will be a checklist of specific deliverables that are needed. Like how texture maps should be created and exported. I don't have that now, but that doesn't matter much yet.

Can you hit us up after you make the first thing, whatever you want to work on first. I just want to make sure you are on the right track. It would suck if you spend a lot of time on something that is way off base.