Behind the Tankard is an award winning result of 30 students, from all kinds of studies and countries, working together for 8 weeks to create a game. It’s a medieval tavern-management game, where you play as the owner of the Leaking Tankard, trying to please your customers without burning the tavern down. During the project I was responsible for 3D modeling and PR communications.
Overview of the game
During the game you get customers who you’ll have to serve, the customers are mythical creatures from all around the town. The main goal is to get to the next day. You do this by making enough money to pay rent by serving the customers. Customers can get angry or leave if not served soon enough, resulting in broken chairs or lost revenue. There are also random quests and storylines of customers coming in.
3D Modeling
As a member of the art team I focused on creating 3D models and textures in the style of the game. The white models are baked to increase performance in-game. The textures use "Tessellation", they are actually placed on flat objects, but appear as 3D objects.
PR
As the PR lead of the group, I focused on bringing our game under the attention of the school. One of the goals of the minor was to get the rest of the school hyped for the game, to get more votes at the school-wide presentations. I did this in various forms. I printed a life-size cutout of the main character Sarah, for people to pose in and take pictures. Our school has hologram pillars around, I utilized this by creating 3D animations showcasing the characters and artwork of our game. We created parchment looking invitations for the final event. also created posters to hang around the school, to increase the visibility of our game. Together with the team we build an actual bar, to serve guests during our show day. We made a sign using laser cutout technology. We even dressed up as the characters of our game to complete the vibe we were trying to create.
The lessons I took away from this project
The communication between team members in a larger (30+) group of people is very important. During the creation of the assets, some key information wasn’t communicated to the programming team, which caused problems in the implementation of said assets. This caused a lot of extra work for both the art team and the programming team. In a future project I would make sure all teams are fully up to date on any new information, to prevent such mishaps.
