Ian Wells - Robot Rising

Robot Rising was an action RPG made in Unity for play on web browsers.

As Scrum Product Owner, I was responsible for scheduling and overseeing all environment art and lighting, level design and building, sound fx and music, game-play and combat, item population, and player progression.

I contributed directly to the project, creating environment art, level design and game-play.

PvP Turrets

Each turret had a basic mesh and an upgraded version.

Object Dye Channels

Every piece of art made use of a dye system. With it we could control primary, secondary, emissive and specular colors.

Icons and Minimaps

I created the bulk of the icons for the game, as well as the minimap for each of our levels. When we began work on our first major update that would introduce PvP, I was asked to help with UI design.

Props 1

Some of the props I created for the game. Every piece needed unique art for each of the 5 tile sets we had at ship.

Props 2

Additional props. Enemy spawners, collection stations, and shrines.

Set Dress

Level set dressing, again shown across the 5 tile sets.

Tile Sets

Environments were split into Tile Sets, each containing their own unique version of proxy meshes. Wall pieces were mapped to a single 512 atlas + utility map.

Scene Visual Palettes

Each art tile set had 8 unique color palettes that could be applied at run-time, giving us over 1,200 visually unique levels.

Documentation

We had an internal wiki that I helped to create. These are examples of some of the processes and terminology pages I created and maintained.

Player Base

I built the environment for the player base, as well as final lighting.

PROXY PIPELINE

I set up a pipeline for art that divorced visuals from game-play. Game information was stored in container objects what could call any art - this allowed art to work in parallel with design and engineering without the usual bottlenecks.

This was also instrumental in getting a massive amounts of content from a very small team. Once a level layout was built, we could apply any of our 5 tile sets, instantly creating 5 visually distinct levels from one.

Similarly, this made swapping in event or holiday items extremely easy, completely controlled by art.

The Grid System

Working closely with an engineer, we developed a set of tools inside Unity that allowed us to quickly build levels.

Visuals were controlled by a Scene Visual Palette, a file that held all the information for dye channels, lighting, fog, and post-effects.

By randomly selecting one of these palettes at run-time, we were able to present the player with a feeling of great variety.

Each of the 6 tile sets had 8 unique palettes created by an artist.

PROXY PIPELINE

The Grid System

Video provided by Eric Chadwick

Visuals in action