JEMMA GILBERT
TECHNICAL ARTIST
Slime Café - Game Development
Sept 2020 - May 2021
"Welcome to the Slime Café! Come and get our delicious drinks and treats, all obtained from sustainable slime sources. So come on, sit down, relax and enough your favourite drink with a healthy dollop of fresh gream~!"
Slime Café is a Café simulator set in a lovely modern fantasy world, where slimes, goblins, manticores and more exist and freely roam the world. Many are hunted or sustainably farmed for the delicious products that can be made from them.
You play as the newly hired Barista, Charlie, at the Slime Café - run by the enigmatic Juliette and Lacy, working alongside a whole other cast of individuals. Prepare the store, learn a whole collection of recipes, prepare drinks and hang out with your colleagues.
You can check out and follow our game development at:
https://slime-crime.itch.io/slime-cafe
The work I've done on this project is documented below! The original starting concepts can be seen on the Jellehtea Factory project page!
Technical links to this project:
Environment
Developing on from Jellehtea Factory, the first stage of concepting was the layout of the Café. The full building had already been concepted as a collection of dome buildings, themed specifically around slimes and their circular nature. I decided to design a hexagonal modular room because of this, so it could be edited at a later date if the room needed to be smaller or bigger.
Coloured Concepts
Greyscale || Sweet || Pop || Chilled || Natural
The concept we went with was the Sweet theme, as we wanted it to be colourful and bright.
Evolution of 3D Scene
Final Café Scene
A few of the models from the Office Scene (Jellehtea Factory) were reused in this scene with a polished trim sheet, such as the plant pots and backroom area.
Materials
Most of the scene uses a simple cel-shader, currently using 2 shadow steps. There's 3 variations for trim sheets and blank colours.
The Glass in the scene uses two different shaders. One is for items in the scene like cups and ingredients, the other is for furniture glass, because the reflection on the item glass reflects too brightly on larger models.
I also had a little fun making a sparkly shader just for materials I hadn't made textures for yet. The main poster currently uses it in scene.
Reference: Glass, Refraction.
Shader Code
Refraction Cel - Shader
Cel - Shader
GlassCel - Shader
Drinks
The drinks of the game are very fantastical. There are 3 types, Hot Drinks, Iced Drinks and Milkshakes. There are 7 flavours of slime that all have their own types: Molten, Solar, Sea, Crystal, Floral, Atomic and Rainbow. Above are their concepts with toppings.
The Cup Models
With the 3 Types of Drinks, comes the 3 models. The main difference with them is that the liquid height needs to be changed for each, because it's calculated off the model height.
However, like the example on the side, the Sparkling Crimson, all prefabs of drinks hold separate objects of their toppings. Mechanics-wise, they are toggled on once a player adds them, and since only some recipes need toppings, it allows error to the drink making process.
There are two Sprinkles and Spice parts due to the gream we have on our drinks, one goes over the gream and one goes over the liquid.
These models may get updated with more toppings.
Also, here are the machine models where the drinks come from!
The Ingredients
The ingredients have a simple coloured version of the liquid shader, without the wave on top too. This is because they don't need it, and have their own labels to identify what they are. I had a lot of fun making up a language to put in this environment, and these ingredients use it the most!
Main NPC Characters
There are 4 main NPCs in the game, 3 were already concepted before game development started, which are Lacy (Red), Zeph (Blue) and Juliette (Green). Morgan, the human character, is a new addition. The Player character is a simple sprite because originally we wanted them to be someone the player could step into the shoes of, but we are thinking of developing them into a proper character.
Expressions
Each NPC has 13 expressions: Neutral; Smirking; Special; Thoughtful; Tired; Wincing; Angry; Cheerful; Embarrassed; Irritated; Pensive; Relaxed and Scared.
The Player character's expressions will be changed with the new design, so they are not complete yet. Juliette also has a pixelated set of expressions, as she is featured as a mascot in some introduction scenes.
These expressions are used in the narrative parts of our game, as we have breaks between gameplay of the café. They are at the start and end of each day, and include choices as to who to talk to after every shift.
Extras
Just some extra things that don't fit in the other parts above.
Custom Font
Itch.io Assets
