Convergence
2024 | Unity | Artist / Sound Designer / Game Designer
Pre-Production
Convergence began as a small gravity prototype developed by my friend Eric Patrick in his spare time. He saw its potential, and decided to pitch it to our school’s Video Game Development Club where he recruited the help of narrative designer Adhi Kona and experienced programmer David Huynh.
Gathering References
Excited to explore the visuals of space, planetary bodies, and monumentalism through this project, I turned to Netflix documentaries such as Our Universe, Alien Worlds, and A Trip to Infinity for ideas on how to present the vastness of space within a 2D game. Not wanting to overwhelm a relatively simple game with highly detailed assets, I made the decision at this stage to design the visuals in Vector art and began experimenting with styles akin to mobile games.
Concept Art + UI Mockups
After laying out techical requirements for atmospheric fog and sprite transitions for planets based on size, I began creating visual and UI concepts in Illustrator in an iterative design with my team, achieving a higher fidelity with each passover.
Establishing Style
Now having a general idea of what the game was going to look like, I then began to explore sprite variations to portray a style that was both simplistic, yet captured the beauty of monumental detail at a distance.
Production
Implementing Sprites, VFX, and Sound Effects
Once all assets were concepted, iterated, and finalized we began to implement the various atmospheric fog, danger indicator, and UI systems we had laid out in our design document. At this point of implementation I took the liberty to develop the sound effects for planet collisions, abilities, and UI interaction. Working in Audacity and pulling references from various sites, all of the sound effects you hear in the game were actually developed over the final week of development.
Playtesting
Taking the opportunity to playtest our game at bi-weekly playtest sessions held by our school's Video Game Development Club, our team regularly tested for bugs, UI flow, and visual indicators to refine our systems throughout development.
Polish
Over the last week of development, we began doing passovers on all assets, sfx, UIs, and a 24 hour marathon of debugging and tweaks. These screenshots are some samples of the final product.
Shipping
Convention Booth
