Faculty of Arts & Science

Digital Futures

Kayli Chow

Dimensional Drift

You play as a rebel who stole a dimension-switching device from an alien species. You were about to escape until you triggered their planetary alarm system, summoning their entire army to stop you. Now, you must fight off waves of enemies and dodge attacks until your team can come pick you up. Defeat enemies, collect their intel, strengthen yourself, and see how long you can survive!Dimensional Drift is a single-player bullet hell styled shoot-em-up game that allows the player to switch between 3D and 2D viewpoints to defeat waves of enemies. These dimensions present a risk vs. reward structure, providing players with interesting choices throughout their experience. 3D poses a lower risk but result in a much harder time to kill enemies. In contrast, 2D allows the player to hit much easier, for the price of being easier to be hit in return.

“My role on this project was 3D Artist, Texture Artist, UI Artist, and Producer. On the art side, I took concepts from other artists, then went through the pipeline of modelling, rigging, unwrapping, and texturing to create the assets for the game. The textures were first made in Substance Designer, and detail was added through hand-painting. For the 3D models, the priority for me was to build simple yet distinct shapes from multiple angles. As the characters in the game go through multiple dimensions, silhouettes and shape languages are vital to visual clarity. The ship is a triangular-shaped hoverboard, which will help players orient themselves in the 2D projected view. This shape also increases clarity to help players understand which 2D object they are playing as.The UI pipeline focused on rapid iterations as the game's design progressed and the need for UI elements for augments increased. The colours of the augments correspond to different categories; for example, red is the rocket launcher, and green is the ship. Grey augments are stat upgrades, with the increasing saturation corresponding to the increasing power of the stats being upgraded. The symbols and shapes used in the augments also correspond to distinct elements in the game, such as the shape of the ship and the shape of the VFX. As a producer, I worked to help bring the ideas and concepts of a team of 11 into one cohesive final product. As the team was very large and the timeframe to create this game was only 4 months, communications and pipelines became key. This is where the role of producer was particularly important, as there was a large gap between the thinking of the art and tech teams. My role in this particular situation was to bridge that gap and communicate ideas effectively between teams, while ensuring all ideas were heard. ”