La Rana
Synopsis
La Rana is a single player adventure game where you play as a small frog spirit to solve puzzles using water and to cleanse the temple.
Overview
La Rana was made by a team of 14 people includeing one producer, four artists, three programmers, and six level designers. We had roughly a month of prototyping and 15 weeks of development.
My Part
Early on in the project I volunteered to do the animation for our main character. While I was waiting for the main block out of the frog, I did some small pieces of concept art along with making a language to use for decoration in the temple later on.
The frog mesh and textures were done by the art lead Clayton D'Mello.
Animating the frog ended up being a bigger challenge than anticipated and, having had very little experience with it, I taught myself most of 3D animation as I went. I ended up re-skinning the frog a few times due shape changes and adding a couple bones to the skeleton to control the mesh better.
I worked closely with our programmers as they were figuring out the best system of movement for the frog and how to best implement the animations. We decided it was best to split the hop (walk) cycle and the jump into three different pieces, including a clip for the take off, the hover, and the landing. This allowed the programmers to manipulate the length of the jumps and interrupt the hops.
Because the frog holds water in its mouth nearly every animation clip has two versions, one where it has inflated cheeks and one where it doesn't.
The final list of animations includes an idle, hop, jump, squirt, drinking, and a bonk (for when the frog has no water and cannot squirt).
My animation reel above does not include the inflated version of each animation, only the idle.
After finishing up the animations, I picked up some extra tasks. I built a couple of extra pieces including a lotus blossom and some pots for clutter. The lotus' texture was made by me and then adjusted by Isabel Grayce.
I also worked on closing up some of the space in the levels by lowering the ceiling and opening the ceiling more. While doing this I also did some basic aesthetic passes.
The rest of my time was spent demodulating the modular pieces that the levels were built with. Welding like pieces together, making sure nothing overlapped, and filling holes. As I was doing this, I also unwrapped everything for custom light maps.
Unfortunately due to our time constraints I wasn't able to finish demoding everything. Kate Blackshear also worked on demoding the main hall.