First Blog Post

This will be the first of fourteen blog posts offering an in-depth look at the game Club Crash. Club Crash is an upcoming four-person free-for-all beat-'em-up game. At your college there is an annual festival called “Club Crash” where clubs display their skills to show new students why they should join their club. There are four clubs to choose from: baking, gardening, science, and roleplaying clubs, each with a unique character and special ability. Try each one and discover your favorite one to play! So far, my favorite character is the baker, who uses a cake pop as a weapon! 

I am Isaac, a programmer working on the shader implementation for our game. We originally were going for a cartoon/comic book art style. For references, we liked the shading from early One Piece and games such as Borderlands and Hades. From these references, we specifically wanted to implement cel and line shading. However, after a few different prototypes, we came to a conclusion that the cel shading was not enhancing our environment art as much as we had hoped. 

As our art pipeline developed, we started looking at other games that used cel shading for the main characters, but not the environment. We were inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. We liked how while they still used cel shading on the main character, they applied a different style of shading for environments known as brush shading. Brush shading applies watercolor-like paint brush strokes to the environment to give it a different look than the main character. If we use real-time brush shading, we need to make sure that it doesn’t use too much GPU computation while maintaining adequate visual quality. We are also prototyping brush painted textures as a possible alternative to real time brush shading. 

In parallel with prototyping our environment art, we also reevaluated our cel shading for character art to see if we still liked it. After a bit more research, one of our artists found a different implementation of cel shading that used crosshatching, fake lighting, and some halftones to really make the shader stand out. After testing the new shader, we liked it a lot, leading us to be confident with cel shading on the main characters' bodies. 

This is the first look of our game; keep coming back to see more insider looks. Also, don't forget to check out our social media pages: 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClubCrash2024

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clubcrash2024/ 

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clubcrash/video/7311206921036516654