Shift Happens

Co-Op Puzzle Platformer

Nintendo Switch / XBox One / Playstation 4 / PC

PROJECT NAME

Shift Happens


ROLE

2D/3D Artist


ENGINE

Unity 3D


RELEASE

2017 – PC, XBox One, PS4

2018 – Nintendo Switch


LINKS

Presskit

Website

Steam



Shift Happens is a project close to my heart and the reason we founded our own game dev studio called Klonk Games. It's a co-op platformer, which was prototyped during our time at university. After a successful grant application and Steam Greenlight campaign, the game became our debut title for PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One and later on the Nintendo Switch.

It was nominated for and won multiple awards including the Deutscher Computerspielepreis (German Video Game Awards) in the categories Best Game Design and Best Kid's Game.


My responsibilities included early visual development and stylistic exploration, the designing and creation of modular level assets and unique environment pieces and artistic supervision of the light and color schemes. Proper integration of the assets into Unity, lighting and light baking and overall artistic quality control were also part of my daily tasks as well as coordinating with the other departments.


Showing off the game at expos, planning and building our booths, networking with other devs and publishers and seeing players enjoying our game was one of the most fun and rewarding parts of my time working on Shift Happens.

At the start of the visual development I had the idea to convey the emotions of our storyline through clear color schemes for the different stages while keeping the overall colors bright and appealing. With that in mind, I made rough color concepts for each stage, starting with the rather cold and sterile lab, to the colorful forest and the wide and open hot canyon until it all literally comes crashing down and the players find themselves in the dark and gloomy grotto. We used speckles of warm colors in the later grotto levels to add a glimmer of hope until they finally reach their goal.


Final screenshots of the lab, forest, canyon and grotto stage including their initial color schemes

From there, we immediately started to experiment in 3D to get the feeling of each environment down with only shapes, colors and no textures. We kept that approach until the end and used only shaders and lightbaking for the environment. Though this had it's own challenges it allowed us to build levels very quickly which was key since the game consists of 40 multiplayer, 30 singleplayer and 8 bonus levels.

Trailer, Screenshots & Awards