Tom Mooney. CGI. 2023.

@tomofnz … AAA game designer or veteran dog walker?

Here you may find some studies and home-brew images done on evenings and weekends (outside of the Baldur’s Gate project I worked on at Larian). These studies help me improve and keep up with new tech. Now you know what I do when I'm not out walking the dogs.

A lot of these images are related to prototyping, for which I tinker around with Unreal Marketplace / Megascans content, because mostly I focus on blueprint scripting like getting buttons to work when clicked and making animations play at the right time. To explore the rabbit-hole of actual blueprints process, check out the other posts in my blog.

Integration of actors into a playable card game as participating components. (Character assets by TalkingDrums).

Here are some assembled surroundings to decorate a collectible card game based on the one in my book. This shows the initial game camera view before it zooms into the game play.

Editor view / layout. Scene includes scattering distributions and asset edits as required.

An additional variant of the card playing session surroundings, this time a fortune-teller’s wagon (mocked up).

A video!

Card collection UI with dynamically updating data and modular tabs. Pre-art stage prototyping layout in Unreal.

I created this ‘medieval’ font and UI scripting, ensuring line break and dynamic updates from datatable.

Page-flipping book with camera moves, dynamic text, image inserts, and line highlights to show card game rules.

All these placeholder cards are slated to be redone (but it will take a good long while).

Selected placeholder/thumbnail NPC concepts from a series. I drew these in Rebelle 6, each about 30min.

World building details : No bug too small.

Panting in Rebelle 6.

Procedural scattering/distribution research. (Megascan assets in Unreal, using Polygonflow Dash).

Procedural scattering, plus lumen and nanite (catching up on render settings) to make a template to speed up testing. (Megascan assets).

Test, accumulating snow geometry added on random assets, and spline scattering foliage on landscape in Unreal.

Hand-painted biome paint after quick model bash in Substance modeler (rocks provided by Substance modeler).

Substance modeler rough model with quick paint-over using Rebelle 6.

Playable scene with chasm respawns, level border collision, wolf den cave, frozen pond, and fortune-teller wagon.

This level is a simple ice pond cavity surrounded by rocky borders. Players traverse from star to star, finding a few optional events and hazards besides the tutorial tasks (locomotion). The level is closed off by a blizzard because players can only leave upon succumbing to the cold in a freezing cave, thus entering a vision state.

Mocked up with marketplace assets to establish a cave (wolf lair) for the level mentioned above.

Waypoint location outside the fortune-teller’s wagon (this is a mock-up). This scenes is also convenient to use as a benchmark, given Unreal’s lighting and rendering settings keep changing every version).