Asterism

Blue Moon
Dev Blog #16

31 August 2023

Chalkboard art

Today's Full Moon Blog Post is a special one, because today is not only a full moon, but also a Blue Moon! This means that this calendar month there have been two full moons (the other one was August 1st). There's an interesting history of the definition of a blue moon, which you can read more about here. But wait, there's more! Today's blue moon is also a Supermoon, which means it looks larger than normal. So make sure to look up at the sky tonight at the Super Blue Moon :)

To celebrate, please enjoy this photo of all the physical art assets I've made so far for Asterism, all assembled together!



Next, I wanted to show you some new art I've been working on for one of the levels in Asterism. The song, 'Neptune', is quite sad and slow, so I wanted an art style that would fit this.

Before I began working properly on Asterism, the first prototype I made that directly links to what the game is now is a tiny art test called Dark. I called it Dark because it was a solid black background, with white-outlined sketches of objects on top in a 3D space. I always had this style in mind as something I would come back to, and when I was moodboarding art styles for Neptune I came across a lot of chalkboard art, which seemed to fit with the gloomy kind of vibe I wanted.



Before I began with a physical version of the chalkboard art, I did some digital tests to see how the effect would work. The first step was to choose between a 2D and a 3D perspective for the level. I wanted the level to feel a little distant, and so it might have been a good opportunity to use something like a side-scrolling 2D camera, rather than the over-the-shoulder 3D camera that I tend to use in other levels. When I made mockups of these two options, I found that I preferred the 3D perspective though. While the 2D one looks closer to an actual chalkboard, the 3D version gave me a lot more inspiration to do something interesting with the space itself.







In the 3D version, I took the UV map of the cube you can see in the screenshot above, and traced the edges to give it this outline effect. I'll go into more detail about this process below. Also as a side note, if anyone reading this is familiar with one of the previous games I worked on, Before I Forget, this is what I did for pretty much all the 3D objects in the game.

UV Outlining

A UV map is created by digitally unfolding a 3D object onto a 2D image. The 3D object stores information about how the UV map should be wrapped back onto it, allowing you to paint a texture onto a 2D template of the geometry of the 3D model. For my test, I made a simple cube in the 3D modeling software Blender and exported its UV map.



I then painted some chalky lines over it in Photoshop.



I made a few iterations of this image to emulate the chalk lines becoming blurrier and more erased.











I also made a version with labelled faces, so that I could tell which face was the front, back, top and botom.



When I imported that back into Unity and updated the material on my cubes, this is how it looked.



This labelling stage was really useful so that when I later wanted to draw more detail, I knew which faces would be most visible to the player!

I was pretty happy with this as a test, and as long as I kept the 3D geometry simple it seemed fairly doable (I'd had the advantage of a lot of trial and error with this approach with Before I Forget a few years ago!)

So, the next step was to buy some chalk and a chalkboard. Maybe it's just because it's 2023 now but I found it really hard to find a chalkboard in the shops. Maybe it's also because slate is awkward and heavy to transport? All the ones I came across had a plasticy texture, and when I tried this with some chalk markers that I ordered it really didn't give the blackboard effect I was after. It's probably a lot better if you don't want to worry about your chalk smudging, but I needed those smudges! I went back to the shops and in the end I found this little wedding slate sign thing, which had a cool texture to it. I got some regular chalk too. I zoomed in on the UV map on my laptop screen to a size that fitted the slate, got a ruler out and drew the UV map outlines on by hand.



Here's the slate UV map from above.



And here's a cropped image of that photo.



I tweaked the contrast a bit in Photoshop and the image was ready to test again in Unity. I unfortunately forgot to take a photo of the cube in Unity with this texture, but the outcome was that the outlines were way too thin. I also wasn't using my usual lightbox / tripod setup so the photo came out grainier than usual.



The next step was to make a thicker outlined version of the texture and take the photo properly. I drew notes on the slate to remind myself which face was which.







I tried out another version with some details to make it look more weathered.







And here's how that looked in Unity!



I was very happy with how this looked, and also the process behind it. I continued working on that scene, which is now looking pretty good! I'm excited for you all to see the final version in the game, which will include some of those experiments with erasing and smudging the chalk lines, as well as a chalk version of the main character, Ruby!

Thanks for reading this moon's blog :)

Next Full Moon Dev Blog on 29 September 2023

Next Super Blue Moon - August 2032

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