We had fun building this

This tiny project was developed within the framework of the workshop series "From Clay to Play" in Gothenburg, Sweden. Two of us worked on-site, while one continued the work remotely.

Over the span of six weeks,  we sculpted our three main game characters and one environmental object out of Super Sculpey, and afterwards baked and painted them. 

Exhibit 1: Bruno the Troll

The troll was attached to several actual stones, which makes him surprisingly heavy. He was painted in a mix of earthy-muddy tones with hints of stone-grey. The sculpted tree roots wrapped around his body were covered with fine-grained wood shavings and cork crumbs, which in turn were painted yellow-green to simulate moss. He was dry-brushed to achieve a weathered, stony look.

Exhibit 2: The Fairy, Bruno's tiny companion

The fairy is sitting on top of six spidery legs with wire at their core. For her wings, we decided to use old plastic sunglass lenses in which we etched an insect wing pattern using a handheld Proxxon drill/grinder tool. Fortunately, baking the wings at 130°C did not damage the plastic :)

Many layers of dark and light autumn colors were mixed to create the "fallen leaves" look of her dress.

The wings received a layer of glossy mod podge to look less like smooth plastic and more like corrugated insect wings.

Contrast paints (the tones "Bone" and "Blood") were used to give the legs a creepy, bony look.

Exhibit 3: Undine, the Spirit of the River

The idea for the presentation of the Spirit of the River was taken from the beautiful book "Nordiska väsen" by Johan Egerkrans.

The hair is highlighted with a few streaks of "Lovetone", an amazing metallic glitter paint by the artist Stuart Semple.

It would have been great to use gold leaf for the eyes (that were supposed to look like frog eyes), but all we had lying around was tin foil and yellow contrast paint, so that's what we used :) Tiny bits of crumpled tin foil, glued to the eyes using strong all-purpose glue (Dana Lim) and tweezers, painted and covered with a few layers of glossy wood laquer - et voilà! We have more or less froggy eyes :D

The glossy laquer was also used startegically on the leaf and the hair to make it look wet.  No dry-brushing here!

Exhibit 4: The bridge

The bridge has a wireframe/tinfoil core for stability. Trying to carve out the stone blocks and paving stones from a large stretch of solid clay proved difficult and unsatisfactory, so we settled on making  a bunch of tiny, separate stones and affix them to the bridge. Real rough stones were used as a pattern stamp for realistic texture. 

The bridge was painted with grey and earth colors, and after several rounds of shading/washing and dry brushing, the  desired effect of depth and weathering was achieved. On the last step, certain areas were treated with mod podge and sprinkled with fine-grained wood shavings and cork dust. The resulting patches were painted mossy green.

Digitalization

We scanned the finished creatures with the Polycam app, which yielded quite good results. The textures turned out pretty close to the originals.

We used Blender to rig and animate the sculptures, finally breathing life into them.

And finally, we imported all the assets into Unreal 5 and built a level optimized for a specific, static viewpoint. To make it resource-effective yet atmospheric and on theme with "Cozy Horror", we layered several pngs of tree silhouettes, blew up a detailed image of the moon as an eerie backdrop, and sparingly used fog and lighting to show just enough of the world to ensure it would intrigue and immerse, yet not distract or confuse players. 

While throwing around ambitious ideas for a full-fledged game with tons of fun features, we eventually settled on a simple game loop and viable game mechanics that seemed appropriate for the given time frame - and which, despite their simplicity, still required plenty of effort and time to get right.

 And of course, no game is complete without its own soundtrack. Thus, an original soundtrack was composed, sound effects added (thank you,  Pixabay creators!) and in-house voice acting done (thank you, Ivanushken). 

As the title suggests, we had enormous fun building this mini game. The workshop inspired us to get creative under time pressure and brought out the best in us. Several of the steps were a first time for some of us, and we have learned a lot during these weeks. Hopefully, we can get together again and continue in that spirit :) 

[Level flyover]

[Soundtrack]

[Story intro]

The Toll Troll

Clean water is a right - but someone has to pay the price...