Faculty of Arts & Science

Digital Futures

Justine Magbitang

Beats & Bolts

A rhythm-based action video game about fighting and defeating a large machine that stole your railway factory job.

“Beats & Bolts is a rhythm-based action game set in a railway factory during the Industrial Revolution. Play as a worker who is trying to get his job back after recently being replaced by machines, all while abiding to the rhythmic rule of the factory. Your goal is to sneak in and battle against the central machine that is taking control in order to save the factory.As a technical artist Beats & Bolts, my goal was to create a shader that emulated patent drawings and sketches from the time of the Industrial Revolution. These drawings were very heavy on linework, as well as hatching to create value. To achieve this look, the shader I designed combines edge detection for the outlines with using the lighting data from the scene to apply a custom hatching texture for darker/shadowed areas. On top of all of this, I also applied a random noise that slightly offsets the appearance of the lines to the beat of the game's main song, serving as an additional beat indicator for the player.Meanwhile, as the 3D animator for the boss machine, my goal was to make its long thin arms loom and wave around like a spider's legs. Since the machine was fixed in place and not able to physically move around, giving it life and emotion through the animation of its arms was important, and this applies for all its states -- whether it was waking up, charging up for an attack, of taking damage from the player. One issue that I had to work around is that there were no attacks on the player that involved direct contact between them and the boss machine's arms, so I had to make sure that when animating, the arms remained either flailing above the player or remained close to its body such as in the slam attack.This work was created in a collaboration between ten OCAD University and University of Toronto students. My roles were in game design, technical art, and 3D animation.See more at: noggindecay.itch.io/beats-and-bolts”