Mutiny
Le About
Mutiny is a card game created by a small group of students when they were in university. The game centered around the concept of being trapped in a storm having to survive on a ship full of people, and treasure that may want to take your life and gold. The objective was to gather as much gold as possible while trying to keep the ship from sinking. I took part as 3d modeler, designing the ship, bringing it into 3D and having a visual root for the player to see what exactly is happening to the ship during each turn.
Conceptualization
For the game, there had to be a health bar for the ship, and deciding what it would look like was one of the big hurdles. and since we wanted there to have the ship seen in danger through cards, I decided to model the boat in Blender. Since it was supposed to look like a pirate vessel, I scoured the internet for something that looked like blueprints for a ship, eventually choosing this one. I then drew over it in a drawing app, marking as simple of an outline I could, and adding either height to the masts or adding thickness to some parts of the ship to make sure when one sees the ship in the cards, they can identify it.
3D Design
I used Blender for 3d modeling the ship and combining the pieces together so it can look the way I want to. I took the reference drawings I made from the bluprint, centered them in blender, and using the mirror modifier, slowly tried making a low polly body for the ship. The ship is a collection of many parts: the sails are plains, the masts are cylinders that may have too many edges, and the biggest and most complex part is the body of the ship. If I were to do the body again, I would divide it into two pieces, one being the top part with the wheel, and the other being the part right under the stairs, because making the area between the stairs and the cabin was difficult to grasp, and overall we really did not need it in the end because that area was rarely looked at. I decided not to paint the boat because we wanted to first bring the idea of the game out into the wilderness, and then polish it later with higher graphics.
Modeling the events
Throughout the game there are a number of events the ship will encounter, one being a shipwreck, in the early stages of development the shipwreck was one of the places where the players can get cursed treasure, and can get hurt of the treasure value was above a certain level. So with copies of the main ship, some rocks depicting rocky waters, I staged mast less boats against the water, and close by we have the our ship. For Events I tried to keep the Ship you are pirating the closest to the camera, and moving either away towards threats or towards opportunities. One major threat of an event was the kraken, a monster of the deep that deals massive damage to the ship, and making an image for a card that could signify the uncertainty and danger this event had was a tad difficult. Making the tenticules was easy, we used the paths and curves to easily manipulate these things into tentacle like things, then give them a material that was more fleshy and oceanic. However just that did not look good, so we made it darker, but we can’t make it too dark or else one can not see anything. So I gave the scene lightning bolts, it made the image more crowded so I had to limit the amount of bolts I could to make sure nothing is making other things look lesser then. Another event the player can encounter is other ships, these could either be a merchant vessel or a small armada, the armada ships were an enemy type that can do some damage to the players and ship. In later stages of development the merchant vessels are another way players can try repairing the ship, and they can plunder it for gold too. The last one I can talk about is the cavern, another gold bearing event that can give the players cursed loot and a number of gold, in the early stages of development this was supposed to look scary and mysterious, so making it I tried making rocks that were as sharp as I could try making, then I positioned them into certain ways to try giving an illusion of a cave. Overall modeling the events were an experience, and I should have made more concept art, but surrounding these.
Modeling Enviroments
In this fantasy pirate game world, you are in a storm, where are you on a map? It does not really matter, you will only come upon a safe land at the end so it’s in wide open waters. In very early development however, you were also trapped on an island where ancient legendary pirates have said to bury their treasure, but that was scrapped. So I had to make an environment that had three things, something that signifies the storm, some sky, and waves. The sky was overall the easiest, I made a bowl by just making a cylinder and cutting the top off, then bevel it, later added some materials with noise to create this almost spooky, out of place look. The water was almost good, before I found the water modifier, I made the water by having this subsidized plane and moving the vertices in certain ways to give the right kind of waves I desired. To make the storm was the hardest, one reason was that the storm had to be volumetric, so I did some studying and made a simulation, just for a cloud, it took quite a while to get the density right. For the navigation cards I had to manipulate the location, density, and color of the clouds to fit certain criteria. Squall was one of the weirdest things since it was like a fog, and I needed to present it as something like a strong flow of rain, but nothing I do really made it look like that, so I made it fog like. For more stormy weather I tried making rain by having another object emit particules in a set area, then I was going to set the timeline for render to be a specific time so I can have a good shot, but the rain did not show up visably enough in the render. The last thing I had to do with environments was lighting, we needed to see the ship, we needed to see the dangers, and there was a chance that we had to print them in black and white to put them on cards, so we had to make sure the contrast was good enough so people can actually see the cards.
Bringing the ship to Table top Simulator
After many weeks of development, we realized that we could not always bring new revised copies of cards and playtest in person, so we had them imported into this game simulator called Table Top Simulator. This game had a learning curve, and more mechanics were adjusted, but being a simulation, it felt off when the environment seemed too lifelike and such. So I made another blender project just to create a panorama of what it may feel like to be on the actual low-poly ship. I took the ship, modled and lit up lanterns, and made a nice sky in order for the TTS players to be on board the ship whilst playing the game.
