Building Alliances pt12

 Collectibles System

While doing my research and from past experiences from games within the same genre as the game we are creating, a feature that I really find fun and interesting is collectables! This feature is usually used within campaign games as a little bonus to keep players replaying and to keep them engaged with their surroundings and exploring all areas the maps have to offer. Due to campaign games getting so chaotic, it is easy to skim over details or skip past an area that the player should have seen. To keep people looking around and paying attention to details or even replaying the game to be a completionist, games will create some kind of collectables system so that the player has a secondary objective besides from completing the game. These items can vary so much from secret documents, thematic toys or figurines, posters or even zombie limbs. These items will be placed all around the map, some maybe even hidden for the players to find along their journey. Finding these rewards can mean different things for different games. Some games will give bonus XP, or currency for finding collectables, some will help you get a perfect clear on a level. Some will grant you cosmetic pieces or decorations for your lobby space, some may give you badges so you can work through a chart and complete the game. There are loads of different rewards systems and collectables systems throughout games to keep their players entertained and replaying their games. 

A few games that use this collectables system are

• Back 4 Blood
• The Outlast Trials
• Zombie Army 4: Dead War
• Dying Light
• World War Z

These games all have collectables systems with a few of them (The Outlast Trials and Zombie Army) having multiple things you need to collect. The outlast trials lets you collect various posters, documents and on some game modes poisoned rats that go towards separate things. Each document goes into a large book full of sections, each section is made up of multiple documents that reveal lore about that section of the game. You can keep finding documents to fill up each section and reveal more lore. The poster appear in every trial and collecting 5 gives you an XP and reward boost at the end of the trial upon completion. The rats are a side mission that becomes available in certain toxic shock game modes. Collecting 10 of these within the duration of the trial completes the side mission boosting your performance rating and granting extra XP and rewards. Zombie army provides you with a book that tells you what each collectable item you can find is. They have about 4 types and one of each is hidden somewhere within each level. The player can look for these 4 items within each level while playing the main objective to secure bonuses and complete the collection page for that segment. 

These are some screenshots from the Zombie Army collectibles system

These are some screenshots from The Outlast Trials collectibles system

Since our game is taking place within the confines of a zoo, I thought that for designing my own collectable I would make a mascot for the zoo and 3D model a miniature figurine of this character that could be placed throughout the map and used as a collectable for players to locate and find for bonuses and rewards. I looked into games that have mascots as well as mascots as a whole to help me design my own!

The Outlast Trials is built up of multiple campaign levels where the player survives and carries out horrific tasks in multiple different sets and scenes as part of a twisted experiment. A lot of these sets take place in theme parks and use a mascot called the Futterman! He is a well dressed duck looking character and is used for posters, figurines, map design and costumes throughout the game.

BeastMaster, The outlast trials - program X lass Futterman den bohrer spüren solo C+ [online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJhEwAoHdvQ [Accessed 9 February 2025].

Another theme park mascot within a game is Robbie the rabbit from the Silent Hill franchise. He belongs to the Lakeside amusements which is a location visited by Cheryl Mason during the third game within the Silent Hill franchise. Just like Futterman from Outlast, Robbie can be seen all around his section of the game on posters, boards and statues. 

Anon, Robbie the Rabbit [online]. Wikijuegos. Available at: https://videojuegos.fandom.com/es/wiki/Robbie_the_Rabbit?file=Silent_Hill_3_Robbie_the_Rabbit.jpg [Accessed 9 February 2025].

I decided I wanted to create a mascot for our Zoo and use this mascot to create a figurine that could be placed around as a collectible. I created a few different concepts for this character using different animals and shapes to make each one stand apart from each other and gave them different expressions on their faces to make them feel as though they have different personalities. 

These are my 4 characters I created to use as possible mascots for our zoo as well as a mini figure collectable. I made them all look pretty friendly because if they were to be a zoo mascot, they would have been created before the population fell and our apocalypse kicked in. I made them all differ from each other to offer variation when asking my followers on my art Instagram account which version they like best. I ran a poll to decide on which mascot I would take forwards in the design process. 

These were the results I gathered for my initial design process in creating this mascot. I left the option open to take any of the characters forward to the next part of the design process and the bunny character won over 59% of the votes received on my poll. It is important to ensure that throughout the production process, I keep referring back to my my target audience to make sure my design work is meeting their interests. I then made the design for the mini figure version of my character, simplifying his limbs and changing his design from the happy mascot bunny into something a bit darker and more appropriate of the game genre we are creating. I added in some new details to make the character look more worn and withered to make him feel like he fits better into his new environment. I added rips and bites across his body and ripped the end of one of his ears off. I feel like these changes were successful in taking the happy character and drawing in from the horror aspects of his surroundings to create a withered version of him. I added this onto my Art Instagram too in order to gather some opinions on how people felt about his changes. 

These were a few of the many responses I received in response to his design. All of the feedback I had received was overwhelmingly positive and everybody seemed to like him as well as the withering I had added into his design! Now that I knew people liked him and this design would be enjoyed by players, I proceeded to the modelling process to create the figure in a 3D format. 

I started out his construction process by pulling in a polysphere to a Zbrush canvas and with the symmetry tool activated, I used the move tool and the gizmo tool to size up and down the spheres while reshaping them into the shape of my character with the move tool. I created the Head, Torso, Left Arm Leg and Ear. I only made one of each limb because I then selected each, and used the mirror and weld tool to create a copy of that piece on the other side of the symmetry line mirrored. 

Using the same process as before, I modelled in a face and started outlining where my the wounded sections were going to go with the clay tool. This I will re-do later on to deepen them and add more texture. I also selected his ears again and deactivated the symmetry tool so i could make just one of them withered like in his design. At this point I added subdivisions to each individual object to smooth it all out and increase it's quality. This turns it from a low-poly model that's pointy and grainy into this smooth and rounded version. At this point I also sent this to my friend who studies at DMU doing graphic design so he could give me his opinion on the model versus the planned illustration. 

He pointed out that the eyes were tilted inwards and made him look really angry when in my sketch he looked far sadder. I went back to reposition the eyes to fix this problem as this is a key factor to the vibe his character gives off to the audience. 

Now his expression is correct, I started giving the wounds more definition. To do this, I had to lower the subdivision back down to a low poly version so my clay strokes don't make the model's surface clumpy and rough. Once I had deepened the divots and added a ridge part around them, I upped the subdivisions back to 5 ( not too high or the software crashes ) I also modelled the hair between his ears and on his belly.

I then started to texture and paint him to look polished ready to be used as a game asset. I selected each section of his mesh and added a texture. I used the shiny plastic texture. This then covered his whole model in black shiny texture. I then selected the desired colour ( using the eyedropper to pick colours from his design ) and clicked the FillObject button in the colour select wheel. This applied the texture with my desired colour to that whole piece. I went through each piece applying the right colours of plastic material. For some reason, this worked perfectly well for every piece except the whites of his eyes which kept turning a darker grey with every colour I applied and wouldn't allow me to move them. I erased these eyes and remade them.

Now that the eyes were fixed and their colouring was correct, I used the paint tool and a blur around the edges of the brush to add in the different reds of his wounds and blend them together for depth. I also altered the canvas background and the lighting to give the showcase environment a feel that matched our game. I then grouped all his pieces together and loaded a polycylinder under him. Using this and texturing it the same, I built him the same little stand that he is perched on in his concept art. 

Here are two final renders as well as a 3D turn table that showcase my final fully rendered figurine. I think he turned out rather well. I think he would work well within our game and reflects the type of environment and map he would be hidden within for players to locate. I think I did a good job of taking him from a happy pre-apocalyptic zoo mascot and turning him into a more withered down and horror themed asset. I think that the material choice does a good job of showing that he is a hard surface figurine but I do however feel as though he is a bit too clean and shiny for an apocalypse. I think if I were to improve him, I would want to use a less glossy material or add in some duller less heavy lighting so he doesn't shine as much. If our game series were to continue, I think it would be fun to create multiple bunnies or even the other animals into figurines that could be located within each campaign level for the players to find but for this current brief, I think this design does the job well.