Squidgies Takeover
Lead Technical Artist & Project Manager
A 2D physics-based puzzle game developed by Tasmanian studio Giant Margarita, it was a joy to work on and a childhood dream come true to work on a game released on a Nintendo console.
Squidgies Takeover was an incredibly fun and challenging project to be involved with. My main responsibilities were:
Creating and implementing particle effects, lighting and custom shaders to help bring the Squidgies to life
Act as project manager on a small team of developers, helping coordinate development, implementation and testing
Take provided artwork from two amazing artists created in Adobe Illustrator and create customizable, game-ready assets
Develop a custom lighting model that allowed our 2D assets to react to directional lighting, to add a more dynamic feel to gameplay elements
Software used
Unity
Amplify Shader Editor
Procreate
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Microsoft Visual Studio
Project examples
Directional lighting
The art style of the game required a combination of both baked 2D shading as well as dynamic lighting, to help give a distinct style without appearing too flat or lifeless. Therefore most objects that decorate the levels (rocks, leaves, tubes, and the Squidgies themselves) use a combination of normal maps and masks to apply lighting to the edges of objects.
All artwork created was flat 2D (no meshes/3D objects), so normal maps were created and the shader lighting model set up to react to point lights used to highlight areas like fire, portals, acid, electricity etc.
Mamma Squidgie
Provided with original, layered artwork created in Adobe Illustrator, a sprite sheet was created for export into Unity, where 2D Animation package tools were used to rig and animate this large “Mamma” Squidgie that hangs out in the level select screen, protectively watching over your level choices.
Squidging Squidgies
It was important the characters in the game, the Squidgies, should… well, “squidge” when they bumped into things. This slow-motion example shows how when the center Squidgie impacts the floor, it compresses slightly. A subtle effect when played at normal speed, it helps add to their personality as being soft-bodied creatures.
This effect was created by taking the physics information from the collision (direction and force of impact) and feeding that information into the shader, which moved the vertices of the sprite on the opposite side from the impact inwards slightly, before returning to their normal position over a few frames. This gives the impression that the object compresses towards the impact, whilst still being able to use simple 2D sprites and standard physics.
Miscellaneous particle effects, shaders, etc.
You can find further examples of my technical art and VFX work from Squidgies Takeover in my YouTube playlist. In most cases, the focus of my work was implementing artwork created by talented artists into Unity and adding elements like normal maps, masks and custom shaders to allow them to work with the custom lighting model I set up to bring our 2D artwork to life.