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Ember’s Oath

High Concept

In Ember’s Oath, you play as Ember, a fire mage with the rare ability to transform herself into a phoenix. In a world where mages have been hunted to extinction, a tyrant now rules with an army of mechanical beasts, determined to erase magic forever. To fight back, you’ll need to master the synergy between spells and phoenix power, to end his reign and bring a new era of magic back into the world.

I am the art lead for this game and worked on Character Creation, Environment, Audio(SFX), and overall Visual Language.

Check out for itch page to play the game! 

https://fools-with-blades.itch.io/embers-oath

 

Process

Character Creation

For Character Creation, I started with concept art for our main characters Ember and her Phoenix form. After a few iterations of her character, and as we developed the story and world of this game, I finished her character sheet and started the modeling process. I worked with the Phoenix first since we needed to be able to test out flying with the finished model more so.

I modeled and textured the Phoenix in Blender, and rigged and animated it in Unreal. This was my first time using Unreal for rigging and animation so it was a fun learning experience.

For Ember, I modeled and rigged her in Blender, and weight painted her in Maya. I wanted to follow the same process I did for the Phoenix form, but ran into some technical issues with Unreal, which you can read about more here. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vd73ng9SGl-LVvPhyz_4hhz43m-OTEoEdShLtzSUVBQ/edit?usp=sharing

Visual Language

Upon settling on our game idea, I started making concept art of the world and characters. We looked at realistic games like God of War to stylized games like Genshin. Ultimately, we knew that for the narrative and overall aesthetics, our game would be at least a bit stylized. We then decided to go in the more painterly direction for our game to incorporate more fluid textures and have more leeway for VFX and models. Since our story isn’t necessarily set in a happy environment, our game is also going to have a darker and eerie tone to it.

I wanted contrasting colors for our characters against the dark background of the environment to make Ember feel out of place and more of a target to the Mechbeast enemies. Ember has a mix of earthy, warm tones and leather-heavy garments to match her hair. Originally, we made her design to look more like an ornamented warrior, but as we developed the story, it quickly became a mismatch in tone. So, we redesigned Ember’s armor to feel a bit more real to what she would wear, and toned down the colors a bit in an attempt to blend in with the darker society she is in.

Creating these visual themes have been crucial when keeping a similar style with all of our external artists also working on assets. Here is the Art and Style guide we keep as an overview of the tone of our game.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QvEkL-j2dcbmK9Yk1tOdqCIcskDo2QR6OdRyAwTYQrM/edit?usp=sharing

Audio and SFX

I have also been creating the core audio of the game and adding it into Unreal. This has been part of my research to learn more about audio in Unreal, and get more experience in audio mixing. This video shows the process of making the fire sounds for the sword Ember uses in game.

Here is my documentation so far on the subject.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SUZQYDhFU75Kt1XUTJ2HUKJBaqv0Flbx3iBLEpNxxg8/edit?usp=sharing

External Artist Management

As part of my role as art lead, I was in charge of finding and managing the external artists we onboarded along with our producer. We used Trello to organize tasks and held weekly meetings with them to check in on their progress and make sure the art style stayed consistent throughout development.

In the Art and Style guide lays out above, we also have a pipeline for them to follow. This made sure assets could iterate through changes and be tested in game consistently for any adjustments that might be needed. Since our team runs with an agile production style, we tried to implement as much of those ceremonies as we could with the external artists as well, by having weekly SCRUMs through discord, adjusting meeting frequency and planning our sprints and backlogs for them.

Credits

Main Team

  • Jon Benz – AI Programmer, Animation Programmer, Level Designer
  • Hritish Duvvur – Combat Designer, Systems Designer, Gameplay Programmer
  • Maya McDaniel – Art Director, Audio Designer
  • Kevin McNulty – Producer, Narrative Designer
  • Ayushi Parikh – Game Designer, UI Programmer, Gameplay Programmer

External Team

  • Jeff Chen – 3D Environment Modeler
  • Catherine Krahn – 2D Concept Artist
  • Brendan Miron – UI Designer
  • Rachit Potluri – 3D Environment Modeler
  • Nicholas Tucker – 3D Character Animator
  • Jora Kupetsky – Music Composer