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Gestalta — making of

Gestalta (v.) — Swedish. To shape, to express, to perform, to interpret

✍︎ Outline of this article:

✍︎ Introduction
✍︎ Prototyping
✍︎ Customized Camera System
✍︎ Music
✍︎ Gameplay Walkthrough

A secret reason we choose to use a mannequin as the character is that it is so commonly used, we can directly use the models from Mixamo.

INTRODUCTION

Gestalta is a short 3D side scrolling narrative platformer which I worked on as a group project with friends. We wanted to craft a story that is told from the perspective of a toy — similar to the Toy Story franchise. But instead of a stuffed toy, the main character is a humanoid wooden mannequin that is commonly used to practice drawing human poses.

Before you continue reading, why not listen to the theme music for this game?

All right, back on track. So the story consists of three chapters:

Väcka, meaning awake, was when the mannequin was given to a baby as a toy. This level is set in the crib with oversized toys and pillows. It started with black and white visuals, and colors gradually became flourish, foreshadowing the beginning of a new adventure.

Resa, meaning journey, was when the baby had become a teenager, and they became interested in drawing. Various painting can be seen on the desk, but at the end of the chapter, the mannequin was thrown into a trash can.

Förgå, meaning vanish, was when the teenager had become an office worker as they grew up. From the perspective of the mannequin, everything now looks cold and monotone, and drawing as a habit is now long gone anymore.

The names here, including the game title, are Swedish. The decision of this is rather simple though: IKEA, a Swedish company that sells furniture, has an item that is called Gestalta — and it is a wooden figure.

PROTOTYPING

Above — drafts of the three chapters (illustrated by Lee Chen-Kang); Below — the results

Character and level design drafts were illustrated by Lee Chen-Kang, who captured the atmosphere really well. The animations were downloaded from Mixamo. The player can walk, run, jump, climb, and grab on to objects. Although the current climbing and grabbing mechanics are still a little bit glitchy, so they are not heavily featured in this prototype yet.

CUSTOMIZED CAMERA SYSTEM

Since this is a side scrolling game, the camera should be on the same side of the level, which the player has limited control over the camera. The camera can be moved to slightly look away from the character, but it will “springs back” to its original position once the player release the camera control.

I intended to create a smooth continuous shot for each level, but at the same time the relative position between the character and the camera should not be fixed, i.e. should be contextual, so different shots should also be made depending on the story context.

Unity’s Cinemachine is a good camera system tool to do this, as virtual cameras can be made to represent different shots, and shots can be blend or cut. Shots can be also set to procedurally tracking target objects, and it works great with tools like Timeline and Post-Processing Stack. But I decided to create my own camera system from scratch with mainly two reasons: to practice coding skills and to get full control of the features I want to add.

Left — custom inspector for camera movements; Right — level in editor mode. Note that each green box is a trigger area for new camera shot.

On the figures presented above, each green box is a trigger, which has its own “shot profile” that contains information for this shot. The structure of this in the code looks like this:

Life demo of the camera system results. Top — editor screen, with green wired box representing different shot triggers; Bottom — actual game screen.

MUSIC

I also composed the theme song for Gestalta. This piece is played when the camera zooms out in chapter one, showing the full level in a wide shot. Here is the theme music again.

GAMEPLAY WALKTHROUGH

Finally here is the gameplay walkthrough of the current demo in all chapters, note that this is a work in progress and is subject to change, although this project is currently suspended.

Chapter 1 — Väcka

Chapter 2 — Resa

Chapter 3 — Förgå

Unity version: 2018.3