Core Defenders - Student Game Project

Core Defenders is a Student Game Project created for our last year at ESMA School. 
It is a cooperative party game with a tower defense aspect. 

I will present you the work I did for this game, from character design to marketing. 

At the beginning, the game was supposed to have two characters, each one having its own ability. We had a tank and a small robot. The artistic direction was supposed to be inspired by clockwork.

With this in mind, I worked on two character designs.

However for technical reason, we decided to change direction and choose to have similar players with the same abilities.

Here is the first design of the player. 

But this design had a lot of issues, especially when it was created in 3D. Arms and head were too big and didn't fit the gameplay. So we started to create another version for this character.

Between this character and the next version, we changed the artitistic direction and went for a post apolyptic, futuristic world, but we kept the game cartoony.

With this design we solved our affordance problem with the gameplay. But we felt like we were missing something with this design. It felt very generic with no personnality. 

So we worked on another design once more, making this robot feeling more authentic.

This design finaly felt like this character had earned its place within our game. 

During this year I also worked on the enemies we have in our game. We have three types of enemies. 

In the middle is the basic one, the first enemie we encounter. On the left we have an altered version of the basic one, it moves faster and has lightning running through its whole body due to its deterioration. On the right is our tank, presenting the same caracteristics as our previous enemies with sharp eyes, greyish colors and sharp shapes.

These were all the concepts I did for this project. 

I also created a Diorama, to help our team and our professors help to visualize the aestetic of our game.

You can see some images of it below and the video.

This diorama was made in Unreal engine 5, with assets of our game. This was made before the character design updates. 

Then I worked on the main menu illustration.

UI was made by another member of the team.

First of all, I did a blockout with 3D meshes in Unreal Engine to find the best composition for this illustration. 

Then I did a paintover in photoshop to add a more cartoony feeling. And for the final version (the first image) I added bloom, rendered to make it even more dynamic. 

Using the same technics, I created our poster for marketing purposes.

For the poster, I also started with a 3D blockout in Unreal Engin to find the right angle, perspective and composition. 

Then I modified even more the composition to make it feel more engaging and appealing. I also did a paintover in photoshop. 

And for the final version, I added bloom, rendered to get the best result possible.

Finally I did a blockout for our teaser to help our motion designer understand what our team wanted to show to the audience. 

This teaser was created using After Effect and Adobe Premiere for the montage. 

During this teaser, every sequence was made in Unreal Engine. I used the sequencer for specific shots (like for the turrets in action or the intro). The gameplay sequences are extracts from our playtests. 

The music is from our game, created by our sound designers.