Gurdit Purewal

VFS FINAL PROJECT - "Fishy Business" is a 3D top-down free-for-all party game where players play as parent penguins that need to feed their baby penguins. Players can choose to fish or fight for their baby desires. The player that fulfils the most of their baby's desires will be crowned the "Ultimate Parent Penguin".

VFS TEAM PROJECT - "Graffiti Wars" is a 3D isometric team-based party game where two groups of Artists go to war with each other by spraying the opponent’s side of the playground. In a 2 v 2 party, there will be one painter and one cleaner for each team. Each side must keep their respective side clean, and dirty the other team. They gain points by cleaning their walls, spraying opponents walls, stunning opponents, and freeing teammates. Fight for control over the schoolyard in this chaotic and fast-paced multiplayer adventure.

VIDEO EDITING - View videos I've edited and produced.

OTHER WORKS - View passion projects and practice pieces.

About Me

Hello there! I am Gurdit, a junior artist and game designer! I attended Vancouver Film School for the Game Design program. I learned new programs like Maya for modelling, rigging and animation! I was able to gain confidence and knowledge of these programs within a month of using them. During the final project I was responsible for 3D Art, rigging, and animating. I have created 20+ character/prop models using Maya and Zbrush.

Contact

Resumes

Projects

Fishy Business - VFS Final Project

"Fishy Business" is a 3D top-down free-for-all party game where players play as parent penguins that need to feed their baby penguins. Players can choose to fish or fight for their baby desires. The player that fulfils the most of their baby's desire will be crowned the "Ultimate Parent Penguin"

Roles

  • Game Design

  • 3D Art

  • Rigging

  • Animation

Responsibilities

Art

The very first art related thing we did for the project was create a Media Design Document (AKA MDD or an Art Bible). In this document we gathered sources of inspirations and previous concept art that I was responsible. . We decided we should use penguins because they're viewed as very cute and friendly by outside viewers but in reality they are quite vicious. It also created a contrast between these cute creatures doing some cartoon violence, it enhanced the games silliness. We knew we wanted to go "ultra cute", which meant taking inspiration from other areas such as sqiushmallows. The parent and baby penguins were heavily inspired by the cuteness of plushies. The fish on the other side allowed me to go more into the comedic aspect of the game. After drawing the concept art and showing it to other classmates for advice, we realized people loved it and thought it was funny. For the bird that fly's around occasionally, we decided to keep the cartoony look the game had going, we wanted to make sure it fit the aesthetic of the game and kept the theme cohesive.

From the concept art to the modelling a few changes were made to the characters. The penguins got more circular to make them more cute and little things like where the tail was placed changed. The fish and the bird did not end up changing too much besides the size of the eyes. We wanted to allow ourselves to make some changes to the characters along the way to ensure that the quality and cuteness of the characters were higher. We wanted to follow the cuteness with these characters even if that meant straying away from the first original design pass on the character.

After playing around with mixamo animations we quickly realized our characters would have to be rigged and animated in Maya. This was a fun challenge because I found rigging and animation a lot of fun and I was very happy that I had the responsibility to do it for the final project. The rig of the character has all the bones of a humanoid rig, and the beak was fully rigged as well. We learned how to use NgSkinTools (Maya plugin) so we made the choice to weight the character using the plugin. I knew that we wanted the animations to be dramatic and silly, it needed to be funny. To do that I found inspiration in some odd places. For example the dive animation was inspired by Taylor Swifts dive at The Eras Tour. It seemed odd but it worked out to be one of the best sources of inspiration. The stun animation was inspired by psyduck and indian soap dramas that my family would watch when I was a kid. The pure hurt psyduck goes through when his head hurts and the way overdramatic actions of the actors in soap dramas allowed me to express the penguins hurt in a dynamic way. The baby animations (like the idle and walk) reflect the parents as young kids are impressionable and follow in their parents steps. With the help of the programming team we used the unity animation graph to implement all of our animations. It was such an honour and joy to be able to add my own personality, interests, and life experiences in these penguins to make them look silly and interesting.

I also had the responsibility to create the intro cinematic for our trailer. We wanted our trailer to feel like a nature documentary but show off the personality of the penguins. This included a few custom animations that were made in Maya. The cinematic used Cinemachine in Unity to move the characters around and move the camera around the characters as needed.

At the middle point of the project we needed to harden our levels, I was tasked with making the levels look icy and modelling a few props to make the level feel more alive. Using our references we decided to make the ice jagged on the sides and more normal on the inside. We tried to keep the integrity of the original level when modelling the level. I made surrounding ice shards that fit exactly in the edges of the actual level, and an igloo for the character select screen. The igloo was originally a flat dome and used a brick texture, but we wanted the bricks to have more height. We decided that the best thing to do was to make the bricks stand out on the igloo.

Before

After

I was also responsible for the textures within the game. It was my first time ever using substance designer so I had to follow a few tutorials to get the results I wanted. We wanted the snow to look stylized and look a little crystal like, just like snow when it freezes over. Along with that I created an Ice texture, dirty snow, frozen snow, and normal snow. We looked at Mario Party for some inspiration on how the snow and ice should look like. For the characters we created a base material and swapped the base colours for the penguins, babies, and fish. We made the penguin and baby have light fur, while the fish looked more glassy because it was fresh out of water. The bird has a pretty matte material because birds bodies do not seem to reflect a lot of light when they are dry.

Design

  • After we came up with the game idea we began discussing all the ins and outs of the game. The team did some research on similar games. I had been familiar with the party game genre so I was able to use my experience in helping the team get more familiar with those types of games. We played "Mario Party" and "Overcooked" during preproduction, and I had played a lot of "Fall Guys" beforehand which helped my knowledge of online party games. This helped a lot during pre-production and production as we gained a deeper understanding of how players interact with each other when they're in the same room, versus kilometers apart. Even if they used voice chat or not, all these factors contribute to the online multiplayer experience.

  • We wanted to be as in-depth as we could be to avoid any confusion from anyone on the team and any collaborators. The first choice we had to make was what engine we were using. The game was very simple to program so to add a challenge our programmers wanted to try out networking using netcode in Unity (This choice came after our prototype, which was very late but turned out to be an amazing pivot!). We wanted our game design to be simple and modular. The more simple we kept it the more clean and more polished the game could be and easier to understand for the players. Since we were on a strict timeline we needed to make sure we could add or take away from the game without disrupting the core of the game. We decided to create the simple core loop of run --> slap --> Interact (fish/drop/feed).

  • We understood the core of our game very well, so next came the pillars. We needed three strong statements that summarized the gameplay of our game. After some brainstorming we realized that players should be moving at all times, so "chaos" was an easy one to come up with. Chaos comes from having a lot of options at once, and that is exactly what was happening in our game design. Next, we realized players should use fish to their advantage at all times as well as almost hoarding them, so we came up with "selFISHness" and "fish is power".

  • Since we felt like the core of the game was strong, we moved on to the main secondary mechanics. This included the golden fish and ambient changes. The golden fish was an interesting design to finalize. In the final product, an arctic gull will fly by with a golden fish in its mouth, and shortly after the golden fish will drop from the sky. To indicate the area it will drop to, a circular shadow will appear. After a few seconds, the golden fish will start flopping back into the water. Players are awarded 1 point per baby's desire but will be awarded 2 points for a golden fish being fed to their baby. Originally the golden fish worked the same way, but in addition to all of that, the baby's desires would change to be the golden fish. This would force players into going for the golden fish and fighting each other for it. We decided to not do this because it ended up restricting the chaos, players no longer had the option to do anything but fight, and as I said before chaos comes from many options being available at once.

  • We had 2 consistent ambient changes throughout the preproduction of our game. These were rain and earthquakes. We had a clear idea of how the rain should work from the get-go. The rain would make the ice slippery and darken the map. This is exactly how the final product turned out...well with a few creative solutions that needed to be decided on quickly. Nothing is ever as easy as it seems during production, that was a fun lesson learned. We thought altering some parts of the movement script would be an easy thing and it would work without a hitch. Unfortunately for us, that did not work. We came up with the best solution possible at the time. This was moving the player in a zigzag while it was raining. This would simulate a slippery feel while not being too obvious that we were adding a zigzag force against the players. Earthquake was our most interesting feature when it came to producing the game. Originally the camera would shake, players would get stunned for a few seconds, and drop their fish. There came a point where we realized it did not make a lot of sense in the game, but we still wanted to keep the mechanics in the game. So we rebranded it into "Seal Attack". Seals would swim by as a warning and then dive underwater. Following that they would hit the ice from the bottom and that would cause the camera to shake, stun the players, and players would drop their fish. We needed to make sure the decisions we were making were best for the game because we wanted to deliver a highly polished piece.

  • All of these features resulted in a 65+ page game design document that detailed all the nitty gritty bits of the game. It included things like the crown system, potential AI, UI/UX, narrative, feedback players would need, and a section full of features we would have implemented if we had the time.

Graffiti Wars - VFS Team Project

"Graffiti Wars" is a 3D isometric team-based party game where two groups of Artists go to war with each other by spraying the opponent’s side of the playground. In a 2 v 2 party, there will be one painter and one cleaner for each team. Each side must keep their respective side clean, and dirty the other team. They gain points by cleaning their walls, spraying opponents walls, stunning opponents, and freeing teammates. Fight for control over the schoolyard in this chaotic and fast-paced multiplayer adventure.

Roles

  • Game Design

  • Environment Art

Responsibilities

Art

  • On this project I was responsible for creating and designing 3D assets and textures that would work in a middle school - highschool environment, while also working with the level designer to come up with an enjoyable environment for the players to interact with. My main goal for this environment was making sure the players felt immersed but not distracted by their surroundings because there was so much going on already. We wanted the graffiti to stand out so we opted for more basic textures and props. A lot of the aesthetic and environment was taken from my high school.

Design

  • As a game designer on this game I shared the responsibility of creating and designing the main and secondary mechanics, this included attack, paint, and clean up. We went through many iterations of these mechanics during pre production to create something that would satisfy us, our teachers, and our players. I also made sure I had a vast knowledge on 2v2 multiplayer games, so I could provide useful and meaningful comments and suggestions during meetings. Having that knowledge helped us move forward faster because we understood what would and wouldn't work earlier on in production.

Practice

The Great Burry Build Off

"The Great Burry Build Off" is an exciting 4-week Minecraft series where top builders from the Strawburry17 community compete to create the coziest builds. Each week, the builders will tackle new themes and have just 2 hours to complete their masterpieces. Minecraft celebrity judges will rank the creations and decide who earns the title of the star builder.

Roles

  • Director

  • Producer

  • Editor

  • Artist

Team Members

Meghan Camarena
Alyssa Maciejkow

Responsibilities

  • I co-designed this miniseries with my team as a way to celebrate the best minecraft builders in our community. I attended production meetings where we sorted out the fine details of the show such as themes, build cast, guest judges, confessional questions, and an episode outline. During our shoot days I was responsible for communicating to the whole cast of what was needed that day. This included any questions they had about themes, judging, and hosting. I also engaged in active communication to make sure that all these questions were answered promptly and everyone felt confident going into the day. Once the shoot was done we moved on to editing and marketing the show. We had a very tight schedule so I laid out what needed to be posted, when it needed to be posted, and when it needed to be posted. The 4 episode series has gained 33,000+ views in just over a month which compares to a monthly average (11 videos) of 6,800+ views.

3D Art

2D Art

Model - Juan Giraldo
Rig - Santiago Calle

Model - Brian Bedford
Rig - Alex Salmar

Pixel Art