Piru

Psychological horror retro-fps game about a demonic ritual at a cabin in the wintry forests of Lapland

Download and play for free: viitahenri.itch.io/piru

I participated in the game project seminar in autumn 2023 at Aalto University as part of my game design minor. As a 3D artist, I created some assets for the game by modelling in Blender and texturing in Photoshop. I focused on keeping the polycounts below 500 and texture resolutions at 128x128 pixels. To achieve the desired low-res PS1 game look, we used a special retro shader for the URP in Unity (github.com/Kodrin/URP-PSX). Additionally, I edited the game trailer.

Software: Blender (modelling), Photoshop (texturing), Unity, After Effects (trailer editing)

Trees

The trees consist of a hexagonal cylinder for the tree trunk and three planes aligned at a 60° angle for the leaves. I shot reference photos of a birch, spruce, and two types of pine trees at the campus of Aalto university in Otaniemi, Espoo. I then turned these images into textures and added snow with the colour curve in Photoshop. In Unity, I then set up the textures as alpha-textures, and assigned them to the base-colours for the leaves' two-sided materials.

Car

For the car I was inspired by a 1990 Volkswagen Golf and the Satsuma from My Summer Car. Because of its level of detail, the car was the most labor-intensive of all the objects, but the mirror modifier in Blender made work a little easier. I created textures in Photoshop for the lights, the car rims, and the license plate.

Mousetrap

The mousetrap, including of a little piece of emmental cheese, is made of very basic low-poly shapes. For their textures, I used free images from unsplash.com.

Rat

I decided not to add legs to the rat to keep the polycount low and because they would not be seen anyways. Again, I used free images from unsplash.com for the textures.

Hand

The hand was one of the most challenging objects in the project. To model the hand and fingers, I used the skin modifier in Blender. I took photos of the top and bottom of my teammate Viili's hand, which I then edited in Photoshop to make it look more pink (like a cold hand) and turned it into a texture for the 3D hand object. The biggest challenge was in UV editing the seam between the top and bottom of the hand, espacially in between the fingers. For the texture of the woolshirt sleeve, I used another free image from unsplash.com.

Flashlight

The design of the flashlight was inspired by a classic battery-powered flashlight from the 1990s. I did not use any textures on this object, but simply changed the base-colour and roughness of each element's material. For the light, I used the emissive channel and increased its intensity. In Unity, I added a white spot light to the prefab.

Axe

The axe's design was inspired by the iconic Finnish hand tool manufacturer Fiskars. Only the blade uses a texture of an image of iron I got from unsplash.com.

Candle

I modelled this simple candle starting from a low-poly cylinder, extruding its edges, manually displacing some vertices, and smooth shading it to achieve its waxy shape. The flame is an octahedron with an orange emissive material. In Unity, I added an orange point light to the prefab.

Footprints

I created the different footprints by drawing with the brush tool in Photoshop. Their design is based on references I got from my teammate Viili. In Unity, I created decals that align the footprints' textures to the surface of the floor.