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RÉpublique

République is an episodic action adventure stealth video game on mobile and PC starring Hope, a girl living within an educational facility of a totalitarian state, similar to George Orwell's dystopian 1984. As the player, you connect with Hope using your iPhone through a mobile device she has stolen from the school's leadership. Using your phone, you guide Hope through the facilities hallways and dodge the henchmen guards as you guide her to safety.

The game can be downloaded for iOS by clicking this link or the app badge below: RÉPUBLIQUE

The project attracted me for several reasons: the protagonist of the story (Hope) was a non-violent video game character who strives to appeal to a wider gaming audience, the studio had ambitious goals for mobile games (story, art, and gameplay) with support from Unity Technologies, and I love working on small teams with passionate, cross-discipline people.

Release trailer for the game, which features the guard character I modelled at the end of the video:

Guard character

My main contribution to the game was character modelling. I was tasked with creating the base model for the guard characters that Hope has to avoid as she navigates the levels in the game.

Model

Here is a quick video of the character in-game, also featuring the subtitling system that I developed:

Texture breakdown

Concept

The guards in the facility that Hope is trapped within are meant to look almost inhuman, underfed, tall, and ethereal.

Translating this concept into 3D without losing these characteristics of the original design were an important part of the process and involved constant design critique and refinement from the team's art direction. ZBrush and Modo have great model tweaking tools and made this process seamless.

In order to capture the appeal of the 2D guard design, I started by sculpting the anatomy for the character in Zbrush. Having this baseline allowed for more realistic placement of props and clothing on the character's body.

I used the mocap actor's (our animator Chris!) body and clothing for reference to make sure the drapery I was sculpting was convincing and made sense anatomically.

Shaders and look development

mobile call quality POSTfx shader and camera shake

Republique's gameplay contained several scenes where Hope would "Facetime" you through her cell phone's front facing camera. In order to make these scenes feel realistic, I was tasked with creating mobile-optimized shaders to recreate the artifacting seen in low-bandwidth streaming video.

This realtime effect was created procedurally using animated noise in the shader, blending between a blurred and a normal render texture of the scene. The speed and size of the noise could be smoothly animated through shader parameters to emulate fluctuating call quality.

In addition to the call quality shader, I wrote a camera script to provide stochastic camera movement and an autofocus pump effect, emulating the hand shake from holding a cell phone camera. The camera shake and autofocus was also tunable, and could be animated along with the call quality using Unity's keyframe system.

Environment props

The environment in Republiqué was split into two main regions - one that we had codenamed "1984," the gritty, dystopian working environment of the facility's guards and overseers, and "Metamorphosis," the baroque, nascent sleeping quarters and classrooms of the students. With additional time that I had during our sprints, I provided some prop and weapon modelling based on reference and concept art from our 2D art team. 

Gramophone

Pepper spray

In addition to environment models, I was also responsible for modeling and sculpting some of the weapons Hope used in the game. This model was created in ZBrush and Modo based on the concept provided by our in-house artist.