Lost In The Loo is a procedurally generated microscope simulator, with lots of cute little bacteria. There isn't a lot of action, but you are meant to morph and become other creatures.
I took part in:
+ Visual Development, including experimenting with shaders to create unique sprites.
+ Designing class systems for sprites to apply progression and game play through procedural generation
+ Designing class systems for sprites to apply progression and game play through procedural generation
We went off of a video of microscopic worlds, for the majority of the game. I made a range of drawings, exploring the idea in my sketchbook.
The style is dependent on the shaders that were applied to shapes, which had gradients within them. I used moodboards to explore the range of colours we could use, although the initial vision didn't come together in this week-long jam.
The game more so developed visually based on the colour ramps and other shaders that were applied, which became the base for the mockups below. One great effect we had was applying chromatic aberration and a lens-like focus or depth to the creatures.
The ramps could cycle through the colours, creating pulsing and glowing effects, among others, on assets that were otherwise completely static. This was a great animated effect, with little marginal effort.
Background textures were photographs, blown up. They created an interesting, abstracted world. For some effects, I scanned objects to create a dense texture.
I also created a pattern!
The characters in the game were rendered by applying a ramp of colour to grayscale sprites, which were animated by cycling the colours through the sprite. I created classes of characters by testing and implementing different sprite shapes in our custom shader, and then I further enriched the classes with colour profiles. By working with our programming team, we came along experimental effects such as mirroring, which emulated the psychedelic effects of the inspiration images seen above.
Lessons learned
Since this was an online jam, I didn't collect a lot of feedback from it. I would make that a higher priority for my next online jam.