We went to the 2017 Prometheus Game Jam this weekend and had a blast making a different take on Prometheus and his shenanigans. I did graphics and coding and Jane did music as per usual.

We decide to make Prometheus into a habitual kleptomaniac since the amount of stuff he stole from the gods at one time or another far superseded our initial understanding of him stealing basically fire.

He was apparently responsible for bringing all sciences and medicine, which was stolen from Athena when Pandora’s Box was opened. He even stole her shield.

Anyway that’s what our story is: Prometheus getting ready to loot Athena’s palace. Again.

Prometheus Character:

I have a base model I have made that I use for all my prototypes, which is basically a fit man with a character studio rig, which is setup to work flawlessly with Unity’s Mechanim.

I started making some clothes for him on Friday as I was getting comfortable with the theme and getting some ideas clear in my head.

Making something like a ‘Greek style’ skirt was my starting point, which I then extended because it looked a little too much with Kratos from God of War. I made a shirt made out of two overlapping pieces of cloth, but that made him a bit too normal, so I added the cape.

Then I spent the rest of the day tweaking the cape, the character’s rigging – it was just a quick setup to get most deformation to look normal – and the movement.

I cobbled together a character controller using some animations I had on hand. I setup a simple BlendTree in Mechanim and tied that to Horizontal and Vertical input, using RootMotion to get it working quick without sliding and such issues.

I then added a couple of inputs for the XBOX controller and a rotating camera and that was it.

It has many issues, but it was good enough to navigate around with. For example the side-steps are small so you get a larger slowdown than I would like when you aren’t moving forward and the camera has no limits.

I also added a light in front of Prometheus at some point to enhance lighting where it was only ambient and I ended up setting it up as a sort of rim light, to separate him from the background.

Athena’s Palace (on Olympus):

I was heavily inspired by God of War – Kratos visits Olympus and there are various marbles and huge columns everywhere, but also gold and brass, so I followed this image I had in my head from playing that game many years ago while doing this of marble floors, metals and big structures.

As you will see below the process was pretty straightforward, I wanted curved surfaces so I based things on a Torus and a chopped sphere, with deformed cylinders to make connecting corridors.

So here are some shots of that location, which I built for the jam.

I cobbled together a few textures, which I was planning on making more Greek, but ended up not having time to do so. I relied heavily on separating surfaces and borders with different textures to avoid unwrapping a lot of surfaces and just simply using box mapping or cylindrical mapping.

I made the book shelves out of chopped up tubes and the books were an instanced box, to which I gave a book spine to by just making one side curved.

I was then faced with the task of texturing these somewhat uniquely and time was running out, so I found a picture of some old books and tiled it on them, it turned out pretty good for 30 seconds of work.

Level Building Breakdown – this was built along with functionality and textures in 12 hours:

The rest is then made with a few textures, about half of them are a copy of the letter texture for the puzzle – so basically all in all about a dozen textures, I even used Unity’s built-in Normal map generation to save time on generating my own Normal maps – which turned out fine:

And the materials used (sans character cloth and skin), as explained a few are just a color and reflection to get that sense of metal-ness :

I also recorded my own lines for the gameplay section (15-16 lines) and Jane did another 2 for the video presentation, these were recorded in one take and in the hall in which everyone was working in, you can even hear the click of me stopping recording:

If you got this far: thanks for reading and stay tuned for more!