Since taking on the game design and game programming classes at Pima Community College, I’ve met a wonderful variety of students, and a few of them have been tremendously talented. In order to better promote enrollment at the college and to celebrate these bedestined aspirants, I created a trailer for last year’s cohort that showcases some of the superb work they created in just over a year. Even the music was composed and sequenced by students.
Each year, the graphic intro I created for the trailer would increase in scope with my own skills:
For the first trailer, I scripted 3D pieces of the PCC logo in Unity so that they ‘fell’ together in time – a familiar enough effect from graphic idents.
2016-2017:
For the second trailer, I wrote a palette-swapping shader for Unity that would transition colors in a single image over time in order to simulate a Tucson sunset. It was fun to make the pixel art for this retro-style intro and to choreograph the animation to match the amazing soundtrack Cody Woods (one of our students) made for it.
2017-2018:
For the third trailer, I wanted to test myself with high quality 3D. I went a bit crazy with this one and modeled an old water mill with a wheel in the shape of the PCC logo. (I thought it was sooo clever to riff on accusations that PCC game dev was a ‘diploma mill.’) Additionally, I used Substance Painter to create some good looking materials for Unity’s new High Definition Render Pipeline. I coopted Unity’s free Book of the Dead demo for the environment but spent a lot of time massaging it to make it fit with the assets I created, including a rippling water shader for the river. Finally, there was the human hand and all of its first-person-POV animation, all choreographed to Cody Woods’s orchestral music score. I think it turned out really well and hope students recognize the tremendous effort on their behalf. It’s only fair after all the hard work they are expected to do.
2018-2019:
