AHOY BLENDER ARTISTS:
Today I want to share with you a bit about our most recent project. It’s titled “Tile Tales: Pirate” and it’s a videogame we developed at our small independent studio NineZyme. We used Blender for assets production and animation, then everything went inside Unity to develop the final product.
What kind of game is this you ask? It’s a puzzle one where you need to slide tiles to complete each level. Our team has handcrafted sixty unique puzzles and there are thirty more, in a free of charge DLC, coming up later. You can watch the game’s trailer here:
We also made a brief walkthrough demo:
We hope you liked the videos. This first beach biome is intended to be sort of a training camp for you to learn the basics so you can, later on, complete the following and more challenging ones. After getting a general idea of what the game looks like and the mechanics involved in it, we’d love to talk a little bit about some aspects of the production.
A SIMPLE IDEA…
After several brainstorming sessions, our team agreed on developing a tile sliding puzzle game. We thought this apparently simple mechanic could be taken to the next level if we could build interesting elements and dynamics on top of it. A first protoype was built to start “feeling” how the game would play.
ENTER THE PIRATE!
We fell in love with the idea of moving tiles to help a greedy pirate get his hands on treasure. We wanted to create a character that had already gone completely lunatic over his love for gold. We even considered having a whole crew of them allowing players to choose whoever represented them better. Here are some initial concepts:
We finally opted on focusing our efforts into a single character and, after some back and forth, we came up with the final design. Then it was modeled, rigged and shaded.
We ended up going for a “Lowpoly look” mainly because the world we wanted to create was gonna be looked at from afar, this would also dictate the character’s proportions. We wanted him to be easy to read and quite expressive, so we gave him a big head with a large hat on top of it; short limbs for visual contrast.
MOVE IT OR LOSE IT!
Once our main protagonist was ready for some action, we started putting him to the test to see if everything would work as planned. We placed a camera similar to the one the game would use in it’s final version and started animating him to evaluate if his design was working or not for our purposes. Animators will always push the rig to it’s limits to find out if it meets their needs. Typically some tweaks will come after the first round of animation, fine tuning here and there becomes necessary to make the process more efficient and the animation better.
Something was clear from the beginning, if we wanted to give birth to a charismatic and funny character, we needed him to feel completely alive. Little details like him reacting to sliding the tile he is standing on, or seeing him getting tired after an important effort, add to the feeling that he is part of the world he lives in.
Here are just a few clips of animation for you to enjoy:
A WORLD TO PLAY IN…
It was now time to build a world for our pirate to hunt for treasure. So we produced assets that followed the same art direction as our character: lowpoly, cartoony, simple shapes, vibrant colors, etc… It all began with a simple town, crafted from the ground up: grass, paths, rocks, plants, mushrooms, logs, trees, clouds and of course cozy little houses.
To achieve the look we were aiming for, we didn’t use textures, instead we went for vertex colors. We created three variations of the main color for every material. So, for example, if we needed a gold material, we first created one material with gold color, then two duplicates of the same material but with a bit of color variation, in value and saturation. Then through a script developed inhouse, the golden object would get triangulated, flat normals, and randomly assigned, per face, the three variations of the material. Like this goblet:
Or this mausoleum:
This way we crafted nine different biomes. Here are a couple more examples:
Many surprises await you on this adventure! Including around 40 characters fully animated. We put together this clip to showcase just a few of them:
If you want to know a bit more about our project, feel free to ask on this topic or contact us via [email protected]. We’ll be happy to answer :).
I you wish, you can follow us on:
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ninezyme
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/88007056
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ninezyme/
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/ninezyme.bsky.social
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ninezyme
Thanks for your attention everyone!
Happy Blending 
