Hills Prototype (personal project, WIP content, will be updating)

(wip update 4) So I like the small town setting + meteor crater, and so I dug into a 'War of the Worlds' -ish horror theme, trying to come up with an enemy and potential game play loop.

Here are some rough sketches, in addition to alien attack stuff I think the style/proportions of the humans should be less realistic more fun/whimsical, larger head, etc. So I'm thinking the town/country side will be dangerous exploration space, and NPCs will need to be behind doors, holed up in barricaded spaces, to separate the live alien/zombie combat from the NPC areas.

Of course you can go in there!

(wip update 3) I finally got around to modeling out the school and the meteor crater:

Keep in mind this is still basically a style demo; story, characters, etc. are temporary, just thrown together for placeholder content (although I do like the meteor crashes into small town, mysterious mayhem ensues idea)

That spider I drew earlier needed a better place to hang out (not sure how this fits with the meteor crater thing):

(wip update 2) New version added a leafy oak tree, taller grass card, the cows have collision-triggered moos, and a pet dog follows you around.

I hand-painted the oak leaf cards, like the bushes. With enough layering you can get something pretty okay looking:

More potential game/encounter ideas:

(work-in-progress Update 1) So my little East Bay hills landscape study started out as a quick Sketchfab scene, but I just threw the assets into Unity with a quick low-res charcter and some simple joystick controls. Needs a bunch of polish, but its coming along.

I love trying to make a plausible looking scene with a minimal amount of art assets, the Unity scene above has 3 ground materials (using a custom Amplify blend shader), 2 grass clumps, 4 rock meshes, 1 bush, 1 dead tree, and a cow

possible encounters?

(older notes) I did the sketches below recently and decided to throw something quick together to try out in Sketchfab (there's a little bit of mudbox for some bump, but mostly hand-paintedin photoshop).

VERY quick mudbox cow (like 3-4 hours sculpt/re-topo/bake, and another 2 to rig/animate):

wireframe and rig in maya:

sketches: