- Maya
- Unity
- Photoshop
Rogue Piñatas: VR Mageddon
During my time as an intern game artist at Nerd Ninjas, I was lucky enough to be able to work on their first original IP, Rogue Piñatas: VR Mageddon. Rogue Piñatas is a roguelite VR game now available on Meta Quest. During my time on the project, I was responsible for the modeling and UV mapping of multiple assets, animating piñata enemies, creating VFX, and more. This page highlights my favorite work that I did for the game.
Sportoise
The Sportoise is special to me because was the very first game asset I made for the game. This piñata combines features of a mushroom and a tortoise (hence the name “spore-toise”). I was given a concept of only the front of the piñata, and modeled the sides and backside using my best judgement. I was responsible for this game asset from the modeling stage to implementation, meaning I did all the modeling, UV mapping, texturing, rigging, animations, and implementation for this piñata.
When animating, I was given a list of actions we needed animations for -- the animations needed were idle, walking, attack, and hide/unhide. All animations needed to be able to loop, and each animation needed to be able to seamlessly transition to any of the other animations. When animating, I saw a chance to add more personality to the piñata by adding an attack telegraph where the piñata opens its mouth to scream before opening its mouth again to shoot projectiles at the player. The art direction loved this idea and the scream animation made its way into the final game.
Beeñatahive
Another piñata I was responsible for from modeling to implementation was the Beeñatahive. I was given a concept and I modeled and textured the beehive to be put in the game. The Beeñatahive is a stationary piñata that spawns bee enemies until it is destroyed. However, during beta testing, we found that since the hive was not moving, players did not understand that it was a piñata that needed to be destroyed. I was later tasked with creating a rig and a set of animations for the hive to communicate this need. I animated three different animation loops for the beehive -- idle, spawn, and aggro spawn. The idle animation plays at all times unless the hive is actively spawning bees. When spawning bees it plays the spawning animation, or aggo spawn after the hive takes damage. When animating the two spawn animation, I timed the movements with the spawn rates of the bees so that the hive squishes and then expands right as a new bee spawns to create the effect that it is being spit out.
Piñata Gibs
I also owned the creation and implementation of the gibs for all piñatas and bosses in the game. Gibs refer to all the little pieces the piñata breaks into when a player hits it.
The first thing I did was create a metallic texture that could be used on the interior faces of the piñatas. I created this texture in photoshop, then it was added to our shader in Unity. The RGB values in the texture are used to calculate the color, metalness, and emissive values of the texture inside Unity.
I also had to implement all the gibs by adding physics bodies to each individual gib. This created a unique explosion each time the pinata was hit, and allows all the parts to interact with each other and other parts of the game environemnt.