The Production of MANTARI

I've been once again given the honor to contribute as a team leader an artist and a designer. Oh, do I love a competitive challenge...

For such a big game to be done in less than 2 weeks meant that there can't be a single 0% hour.

Dive deep and explore the neon reef with the latest Mantari underwater ship model. Collect sea urchins and watch out for local hostiles in a StarFox inspired underwater shooter "Mantari".

After I got to know my new team and familiarized myself with their way of communicating, I was able to note down the roles for each of them, making sure that we can hop on catch up calls every day.

Brainstorm call

I started by taking the stereotypical star fox galactic theme into the relaxing underwater depths. Instead of the ship, I could not stop dreaming about the mysterious manta as the main character. However, I noticed our programmer talking passionately about our game potentially being race type Starfox game which seemed to contradict my relaxing underwater theme but after thinking of turning manta into a manta-themed ship, we compromised to take the race into the deep blues of Mantari world.

Production

The initial plan was to finish the game in one week to have another week for QA and any additional mechanics. There was not enough time for me to draw an entire environment concept art, so I took the bull by the horns and immersed myself into deep unity research to master both character, environment art, and level design.

The first part of the project was managed with the help of the Trello board, and agile methodology. I put a deadline for cave assets and corals for each of our 3D artists in a couple of days while I was getting used to the Unity terrains system. And since the manta ship was the most important aspect of the game, I put it as a challenge for anyone, who thinks that they can recreate it the best in a week.

Another vital part to learn and implement was shaders and VFX, which I also made a tighter deadline for, to make sure that each of these tasks is realistic and if not, we would have enough time to turn the project into a simplified direction.

Our programmers and 3D artists, even if not all, worked at a faster pace than I expected to so this is where I was able to focus on putting the assets together and plan out 3 themes for the map.

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Ship Concept

For me the project started by quickly putting concept art together so that our 3D artists can start working on the main ship and I can start putting the schedule for the next two weeks together as soon as possible.

The early concept turned out quite bulky and too pointy for an underwater theme, however, it already created the base shape that I decided to keep recreating.

After analyzing manta rays structure, with each new ship variation, I did my best to keep the mouth and whiskers as close to the actual animal as possible. This lets me be more creative with a tail without losing the similarity to an actual manta ray. And as the weekend started to come to an end, I had to start wrapping up my concept sketches by drawing them from different perspectives and in brief color to make the model as understandable as possible for our 3D artists.

Finalized concept ready for modeling after I rounded the edges

The trail was later attached with a trail renderer in the Unity engine.

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Level layout

1st Theme

The 1st theme is based on a classic tropical sea bed, filled with corals. It starts low as the caves gradually become bigger with the loopholes getting higher.

In the middle of the 1st theme, a player can choose two pathways leading to a short hall-like pastel cave. After the player gets used to the positive color scheme, they are immediately welcomed with a dark contrast right after they leave the cave.

The mood switch within 5 seconds of gameplay in the middle of the map

Shortly after I set up a transition pathway through the ribs into a 2nd theme: The crystal caves.

2nd Theme

Within crystal caves, there is not only a sudden color scheme change but also a sound effect change. The player has to swim through a series of obstacles that are made out of glowing crystals.

In-game screenshot

3rd Theme

3rd theme is the shortest, but the most dramatic one. Having a vulcanic color scheme as a reference, played a big part in making the theme stand out even more from the previous ones.

The narrow walls give an illusion of restricted player movement

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Lighting

The magical feel that we wanted to give the player required a base knowledge on shaders and lighting. It was really easy to get carried away when having glowing assets AND the lighting, which turned the levels into hot neon porridge. But after getting rid of the glowing shader map for certain corals and adjusting the levels of the lighting, I and our technical artist were able to balance out the contrast and provide a somewhat tasteful final look of the game.

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Enemies

"Mantari" was planned to have 4 types of enemies which are divided into two types: static and offensive. The initial plan of the enemy list was: Piranhas, sharks, and jellyfishes, with only jellyfishes being static. Unfortunately, we did not hear from the modeler who was assigned to do the shark model so in the final result our hardworking 3D modelers and programmers brought:

Static red and purple jellyfishes

Credit: Phillip Weaver

With the red color indicating higher enemy health.

Manta ray, which is a non-static non-offensive enemy due to the animals' nature.

In the game, this type of enemy reacts as a decorative obstacle getting in your way.

Credit: Phillip Weaver

Piranhas: offensive enemies based on AI, attacking after the player reaches a certain distance till their location.

Credit: Andy

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Conclusion

This was the most ambitious 2-week project so far. Working with yet another team I've never met before has its own risks but it didn't take long to realize just how many talents I've got with me. We faced a lot of issues within the engine with the rail camera and assets getting overridden with the collaboration system, which made us lose hours of work. Looking back, I would change quite a few things visually, including post processing and shaders. But after winning 1st place, we are sticking together as a team for another upcoming 3D dungeon crawler, where we will tackle our issues and develop yet another magical experience for players.

You can check out "MANTARI" on itch.io here.

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Auguste Lubickaite - up2015821@myport.ac.uk