About
Be Water is a 3D platformer made in 9 months as a capstone project for the NYU Game Center by a team of 7.
I owned our game concept, gameplay design, visual direction, 3D art, and co-owned our level design.
The software I used included Unity, Maya (Modeling), Substance Painter, Visual Studio (C#), Google Docs, Google Slides, Jira, Trello, and GitHub Desktop.
Media
Play as a teensy drop of water.
Switch between solid, liquid, and gas to solve platforming puzzles.
Explore a vibrant kitchen countertop.
Brave the sinister air vent.
Process
Be Water has always been more than just my team's capstone project—it was also a personal game concept I'd been sitting on since high school. And at the beginning of the semester, when I had the chance to pitch it to the team, you can bet I took it.
Concept I used to pitch the game.
Screenshot from our final build!
From the start we wanted the game to take place on a kitchen countertop, we just needed to find the right inspiration.
After scouring listings on Zillow, the team really liked this elongated, U-shaped kitchen we kept seeing. It can be hard to tell in-game, but from above the inspiration becomes clear.
One of the references we used.
Aerial view of the kitchen in-game.
Despite the look of the screenshots so far, we had actually planned for an entirely photorealistic direction early on. I even modeled the kitchen sink in a realistic style!
The old kitchen sink, rendered in Substance Painter.
But while we all loved the look of our kitchen countertop, I was still working on translating the idea of "being water" into game mechanics. It was one of the more unexplored aspects of my original pitch (ironic, right?), so a lot of my early ideation was spent exploring potential abilities for our playable droplet.
A silly concept for squeezing through tight spaces.
Big fan of diegetic indicators.
But none of my designs were sticking. It wasn't until we had a big group-wide ideation session that I finally found a concept the team liked: what if the droplet could turn into steam?
My initial concept for turning into steam.
How is the player's jump affected?
After some prototyping and further noodling, we decided to expand on the ability to turn into steam by including ice, creating a sold-liquid-gas style state-changing mechanic.
The three (sorry plasma) states of the matter.
Once gameplay started getting locked in, I refocused my attention to 3D modeling. As the only 3D artist on the team, it was my job to model each and every asset we needed—including the apartment itself.
The apartment in all its glory.
You can download Be Water on itch.io.
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