About Aspergion
Aspergion is an adventure game created to raise awareness and promote equity for this minority group. Designed by people with Asperger's and realised by Digital Media Design students at Swinburne University Aspergion takes a unique approach.
Targeted at Neurotypical high school students, the wonderful worlds have been created by people with Asperger's, sharing their experience and dreams to help young people understand and appreciate those who are “wired differently”. The project aims to promote interaction and to develop respect.
The Redesign Process
After lauching the game in early 2011, the Swinburne Digital Media Design team experienced some bugs and lag that cause the game to be impossible to play on a normal PC. As a result, the teachers decided that the game needed to be redesigned, as an effort to trim out unescessary details, scale down the terrain to a more playable size, organise everything up.
In late 2011, a new team of teachers and students was formed. We kept all the ideas, made adjustment to the old concepts, rebuilt most of the models, re-textured the main character, introduced new NPCs and GUI. The game purposes was the same, but everything else changed.
The 2011 Team
The Plaid Calamari Continuum
My team was in charge of the planet called The Plaid Calamari Continuum. This below is what I contributed.
Modular Models
As a new development, we used modular models method for our environment. That means instead of each building has its own UV map (which result in a thousands of 500x500 px images, sometimes 1k), now every building/objects in an area was made by modular pieces, sharing 1 large 2k UV map, something that looks like this (please note this image was a WIP):
The Town Houses
Because they were made by the modular pieces, we could customise and made as many houses as we wanted, all share an UV map.
The Shrine/Temple
The Landing Pad
NPC Texturing
I was also in charge of texturing the planet's human NPCs. Using real reference images, I was able to achieve some very realistic look.
(In this image the scarf was hidden by being painted black in its' UV map's alpha channel)
Main Character Texturing
Using the same method, I reworked the Main Character textures.
(Models and Normal maps provided by James Berret)
The Head
The Skin
Clothing
I also did the main character clothes' textures, for character customising.
Character Rigging/Animation
I was in charge of rigging and animating two types of NPC, the Troll and the Tree. As they were quite similar to each other, I made one rig and animated one guy, then copied all the information to the other one, made tweaks, to save time.
(Models provided by Sam Hakem)
