Monk Simulator
Monk Simulator is a game created for LudemDare47 with the theme "Loop". Monk Simulator immerses you in the daily task of a monk such as watering plants, meditating, brewing beer. This game focuses on mindfulness and finding joy and peace in cyclicality.
The player is given a daily checklist of chores that they are to complete. When each task is completed a new chant is added to the background soundtrack. At the end of the day, the game resets, and you can do it all over again.
CREDITS
Trento von Lindenberg: Producer, Programmer, Sound Designer
Amy Huo: Programmer, Composer
Sydney Ayers: VFX Artist, 3D Artist
Austin Garcia: 3D Artist
Special Thanks to Ian Craig, Jack Phillips, Nick Pacitto, and Carter Ayers for Gregorian Chanting.
Props
I was extremely excited doing prop creation for this game because this was the first time I used Maya for a game jam! Turns out, I like Maya a TON more than blender. The work flow intuitively makes much more sense to me. I am proud of my watering can and my pretzel models. I also learned some Substance Painter for this game. It took a little bit of time, but I figured out how to use blackmasks and smartmaterials to my advantage so I could really churn out textures.
VFX
Foliage
Although most games just use programs like SpeedTree, sometimes it is still important to be able to create your own trees in a pinch. I am proud that I created a tree that was pretty optimized! Although most of this tree's creation went pretty smoothly, I did learn one quirk about Maya through this process. Apparently, copy-paste and duplicate are very different in Maya. Copy-paste creates a new texture for every copy.... this created quite a problem when I realized I had about 1,300 duplicate textures. Lesson learned!
Candle
This candle was a fun little effect I did. I wanted it to look just slightly cartoon-y, but also fairly realistic. The candle flickers just slightly, and has the different zones of a flame, including the little bit of blue at the bottom. The monk had to put out the candle at the end of each day, so I needed a satisfying poof of smoke to appear. I made it go fairly quickly out, yet also had it billowing upwards. For both of these, I sat and watched videos of flames to dissect the parts of each effect.
