Guudo - Student Game Development Project

The Core Experience

Guudo presents players with both a fun but pressuring experience, as they are on the constant search for the correct parts to make Guudo’s ‘humanoid’ shell whilst also having to navigate a vast movie-set themed environment. Additionally, Guudo allows the player to have their own creative side shown through their own customisation area, where it provides the player with variety, inevitably bringing them back to replay the game. Both trying and creating new bodies with different combinations of found props/ objects, but as well having to reach new items in more difficult places than their previous play-through. Guudo is welcome to all family homes who are ready for an adventure!

Concepting Guudo

Team Omni strived to create a 3D, action-adventure platformer that is aimed to give an enjoyable and memorable experience for the player. The game itself was inspired by many nostalgic games, including Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Ratchet and Clank, plus many others that each team member related on being brought up on during the PlayStation 2 generation, so Guudo was made to give that feeling of nostalgia. We chose to make the character of 'Guudo' himself a recognisable mascot through the design and movements of him and also giving him a design that was quite unique. 

When it came to creating the worlds that Guudo gets to explore, the team agreed on giving the game set themes within a movie set to help get an idea of our scope and we could foresee what we would need to bring the worlds to life. 

Art Direction

To keep that nostalgia feel the art team agreed on using a cartoony PBR art style with bright colours to really make the worlds pop and colour block the world for a pleasing look while keeping in mind a low poly workflow to allow for game optimisation.

Shaders were also a large part of developing the visuals we wanted. Guudo’s material shader itself gives Guudo a liquid/gel-like appearance that sways, moves, and deforms as the Player traverses the level. The art team was able to achieve this using Unreal Engine's inbuilt shader systems. The water shader is used in the ship scene for the water around the ship, made to create waves around objects submerged in the water automatically as well.

(As seen above) Omni gave Guudo the ability to scan the area for the surrounding objects, highlighting them to show where pickup items are to help the Player identify pickups from other static models laying around the map. The team decided to include an outline shader because the game is very fast-moving and we wanted the players to be able to easily identify pickups even at a distance while not being visually overwhelming.