Tour de Breakroom
Yo what’s up! It’s me, Paul–I’m the technical artist on Unpaid Intern and responsible for making sure our beautiful, juicy art behaves properly. Also, that it makes sense to you, our beloved player. I handle a lot of assets from a lot of very talented people (including our Art Lead, Che), from sprite sheets and sparkly particles to scripting audio clips and button functionality. So, why am I here before you, you ask? Well, honestly, my producer reached out and asked if I had any interesting stuff I wanted to turn into a blogpost for y’all. And you know what, I do.
(final product)
One aspect of Unpaid Intern that I wanted to showcase in particular is our Breakroom area. This functions as the series of menus the player accesses for the shop, claiming rewards, their news/notifications about the game, and various settings. The Breakroom serves as our way of representing lots of information with an in-universe theme and functionality, our diegetic connection to everything outside of running your ass off in the core game.
(Che’s initial research)
The Breakroom has had a lot of work put into it from several departments and has already been through a ton of iterations. Some of the earlier prototypes of this space were designed to be a fully 3D environment and function as so. The objects would house menus for different aspects of the game (i.e. the fridge is your inventory, the vending machine is the shop, etc.).
(a 3D, flat-shaded view of this space in Blender)
We’re developing Unpaid Intern with Unity and even though it’s a 2D game, the engine handles both 2D and 3D seamlessly. The idea here was to have invisible buttons overlaid on the objects. When the player touched an object the camera would move through space and snap to a position in front of that object. The player could then use the object like it actually works, buying items and consumables out of the vending machine, checking their stats on the white board style leaderboard, and filling up on the elixir of life before a run (coffee is the elixir, of course).
(we reduced the resolution of each frame rendered to give a sharp pixel look to the 3D objects)
We knew this scene would be the heaviest in our game to process for mobile devices. Our answer was to translate these camera motions into animations as video files and the player would be nonetheless wiser (sorry for trying to trick you, we hope you’ll forgive us). We hit way too many roadblocks while trying to handle video files in a PWA (progressive web app) on mobile devices and eventually decided there might be a more lightweight solution.
(the skeleton of the breakroom in Unity & Che’s hand drawn version, respectively)
That solution was still to use a render of the space and button overlays on the different objects, but no fancy camera movement. We decided to lean towards the awesome art style we already had going in so many other parts of the game and draw this space, and the other menus, as static images.
(different screen designs for our notifications, store, daily rewards, and leaderboard)
Finding the balance between a stylized UI that matches your game feel and something that is just as enjoyable and functional to use is a tough battle. It’s been a fun adventure so far making Unpaid Intern for all y’all and hope you enjoy it as much as we have making it. We hope these deep dives are enjoyable little windows into our world. ‘Til next time on…Unpaid Intern!
(can he beat Goku though?!)