Red Veil Operations
Red Veil Operations is a 2 player CO-OP mobile game my team and I developed over the course of 3 weeks (ended on 14.03.2025), for a university project. In this game you play as either a burglar or a camera operator. The 2 players have to cooperate, the burglar being present in the map, avoiding a monster that is sound sensitive and always roaming the environment, with the goal of collecting valuable jars. The camera operator’s job is to guide the burglar through the map and give indications so that they can avoid the monster, helping them to escape with the valuable goods successfully.
This project, I was mostly responsible for the monster and animations, as well as setting the tone for the game, art direction, and optimization. The visual style of the environment was decided by my team and I collaboratively as an abandoned hospital, but not one that is very old/run down. This space needed to give off the feeling of being left in a hurry by people who were panicking to escape, not something aged. Therefore, we made sure to add an appropriate amount of blood splatters where needed, as well as only a small amount of dirt.
For the monster, I wanted to create a scary and intimidating creature, but not spooky, something that would be unsettling/disgusting to look at. That is why I immediately jumped to body horror and tried experimenting with multiple methods of showcasing that idea. However, due to scarce experience at the time and time constraints, the animations we decided to use for both the creature and the player character were imported from Mixamo. Therefore, the overall structure of the body needed to still be humanoid in order to function with the animations on the platform, hence why its stance is still human, but with some extra flavor!
As for the animations, I had not worked with 3D animations prior to this project, therefore there came multiple complications when importing them into unity, getting them to function properly, and making sure they fit what was needed. Some things could still be improved, such as the flashight which is not being held by the character but instead is simply parented to the hand, but with the experience in this field that I had at the time, this worked well enough for the purpose they were intended for.
For optimization, which was the main focus of the project considering we needed to make a mobile oriented product, the other artists in the team and I went into this with optimization in mind. We kept the poly counts of the models low, the texture sizes small, and we reused as many assets, textures and materials as we could in order to not run into any performance issues. Having this as a base, the settings to be done in Unity were very simple to set up, and the game ended up running with no performance issues on all the devices we tested.
Title screen of a scene in the game's environment, setting the scene and atmosphere from the beginning.
Patient Zero - concept art of the monster that will be chasing the player around the building. With the starting point of a "stitched together failed experiment", I played around with multiple methods of portraying the idea: scary, but not spooky!
Modeling stylesheet I created to help define the limits and set guidelines for the models we would be producing for the game, in order to keep everything optimized.
Texturing stylesheet I created to act as a guideline for what materials to use in the texturing process, as well as what brushes to use for bloodstains on props and the environment. We reused a lot of the materials when possible to maintain consistency.
Multiple previews of the finalized Zbrush sculpt I made of the creature based on the concept art my team and I agreed on. I incorporated elements from all 3 concepts, with lots unusual body parts, stitcehs, and a gaping mouth spanning the entire torso.
Previews from Maya of the retopologized model for Patient Zero. After researching the limitations of mobile games for Unity, I aimed for anywhere between 3000 to 10000 faces with this retopology, ending at around 6000.
Turnaround renders of the finalized textured Patient Zero. Wanted to get a grotesque look accross, with the stitches added through texture in order to avoid extra geometry on the model.
Finalized model of Patient Zero
Showcase of some of the props that I textured for the environment.
The map layout of our environment for the game: the ground floor of Mortis & Co., a run down clinic destroyed by its inhuman experiments.
Mixamo animations that I gathered, adjusted, and implemented for Patient Zero.
Mixamo animations that I gathered, adjusted, and implemented for the player character.
In game view of the Patients' Room with all the assets in place.
In game view of the Operating Room with all the assets in place.
In game view of the Laboratory with all the assets in place.