Fish Fosh: A Digital 2D & 3D Animated Game

Long ago, fish were able to evolve with legs, allowing them to enjoy life on land. We follow a story of a fish with legs named Fishy Boy, that was living a peaceful life alongside other fish-legged brethren. Then all of a sudden, new creatures start to emerge in the sea with newly evolved limbs, abilities, and desire to eat the Boy family. Has the lack of fish left them starving? Not only must we protect our family, but we must protect our home!

Inspired by fishing games, Fish Fosh is an interactive 2D and 3D animated game that allows you to interact in the main overworld to catch fish in preparation for boss-battle levels (coming soon!). Using a game controller, the player will be able to control the main character to use the fishing rod, interact with fish, and try to survive their minigames. In later versions of the game, the player will be able to use the fish they catch in the overworld to unlock special abilities that can be used within boss battle sequences.

Conceptualization

Mock-Ups

Character Story Thumbnails

Unity Gameplay (2D only)

Unity Gameplay (2D + 3D)

Character Story Storyboards

Completed

How?

The 3D models including the terrain, the fish shadows, the dock, the bucket, the beach chair, and the sign were created in Blender. After modeling, they were exported as OBJ files into Procreate to have their UV maps drawn to match the brushes and style of the other 2D elements within the game. Once these were made, they were implemented directly into Unity as meshes (the form itself) and materials (the UV maps). The short looped animation of the fish shadows wiggling back and forth was created within Blender using its animation keyframe function. All other 3D elements within the game were created within Unity or were referenced from free Unity assets online.

The 2D elements were created within Procreate and Procreate Dreams. Speaking specifically towards the game itself and not the animatic, all elements were originally drawn by hand as a part of conceptualizing the project, but were then imported digitally into Procreate to be digitized and colored. This includes the UI, the 2D visual elements, and the main billboarded character, Fishy Boy. The main title screen looped animation was created entirely in Procreate Dreams. All of these drawn items were then brought into Unity as images, then turned into sprites to either be a sprite within the game or as an image on a canvas to be viewed as a UI piece. The animatic of Fishy Boy's story was created entirely within Procreate Dreams.

Why?

What I hoped to gain from my senior project was to further build upon my animation ability, and use 3D modeling and my 2D animation skills within my final project. Having seen the capabilities of TouchDesigner from VIS 145B, I found that I better understood what I needed to know about implementing elements to be interactive with the viewer and other elements. But instead of wanting to try and push this forward simply through a purely node-based programming environment that makes multiple interactive elements difficult to sustain, I wanted to work within a game engine instead--- especially since game engines can seamlessly take in 3D and 2D implementation. To talk more about my original vision with 3D and 2D, I had worked with Blender and Procreate Dreams in the past, but had never tried joining them together. With my strong interest in animation as a form of visual media, I wanted to explore both 3D and 2D within this interdisciplinary project to really try and push myself to learn more about them as types of mediums.

Speaking more to the stylization and structure of the game, I was initially inspired by the game Cuphead. Cuphead is a great example of how it is to have full 2D animated style within a video game while being able to implement correlating 3D parts to fit alongside the main 2D style. The idea of creating a 2D visual style game with 3D background forms is something I wanted to work towards doing since I also really love the hand-drawn feel of video games like Cuphead. To explore this idea within Fish Fosh, I chose to make the main player a 2D billboarded sprite, made the other fish personalities drawn in 2D, have all the UI be a 2D hand drawn style. As for everything else, the terrain, the fish shadows, other elements like the dock, the bucket, the beach chair, and the sign, are all 3D elements. Essentially, the whole world is 3D, while everything that relates to the characters is in 2D. I did this on purpose to have the elements between 2D and 3D balanced, and challenge our perception of these elements put together all at once.

Wk 3: Concepts & Sketches

Solidify concepts, story, and plans with sketches of maps, bosses, and other functions of the game.

Wk 4: Usable Drawings

Complete solid, outlined drawings for the characters, bosses, items, and menu.
Complete sketches of complex portions including maps, story, attacking, etc.

Wk 5: Midterm - Proof of Concept.

Show basic functionality of the game with the solid outlined drawings within Unity.

Wk 6: Determine Functionality

Fix any bugs within Unity
Solidify what functions left that are needed within Unity and determine what needs to be made to be made either 2D or 3D

Wk 7: Animation Sketches

Finish finalizing any other important functionality needed in Unity
Determine the scale of the minigames and functions

Wk 8: Fishing

Implement the fishing functionality
Make fishing connected to the character functions

Wk 9: Final 160A: Import Elements into Unity

Import the animation and background sketches into Unity

Wk 10: Illustrative Graphic Design

Finish coloring anything that hasn't been
Solidify what else needs to be implemented

Spring Timeline

Wk 11: Color & Blender

Fill in basic color bases for the animation
Create hard models of Blender background models

Wk 12: Blender 3D Model Details

Add details to the Blender models

Wk 13: 3D Model Texture & Color

Add solid colors and texture to the models in Procreate

Wk 14: Background Scenes

Implement UV maps back into Blender and record finalized version for game

Wk 15: Midterm crit: Implement into Unity

Implement new colored animation & backgrounds into Unity

Wk 16: Storytelling Aspects

Complete color of title screen
Complete conceptualization for UI & other visual elements

Wk 17: Complete UI

Implement the drawings into Unity
Complete UI functions

Wk 18: Unity Functionality

Finalize the functionality of all elements within Unity, smooth out everything
Implement controller functions

Wk 19: Final 160B: Present Finished Piece in Crit.

Wk 20: Gallery install and exhibition.