ZibZib Smoothie Agency - Unity project - 3D Modeling and Environment

Hello everyone !

This is by far the biggest project I worked on during my Bachelor's degree ! We had exactly 8 weeks to imagine, design, and bring our game to life.
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Our team consisted of four people:
- Nebulyne (ArtStation): Art Director, 2D Artist, 3D Artist
- Zakouski (ArtStation): Game Designer, Technical Artist, UI Designer
- Adrien: Programmer
- Me : Coordinator, 3D artist, Environment Artist
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Pitch of our game :
Zib-Zib Smoothie Agency is an exploration game where your mission is to satisfy aliens with rather unusual culinary cravings. To prepare their recipes, you must explore different planets within a limited amount of time, searching for and collecting a variety of fruits. But be careful : each fruit has its own unique effect !
Discover and experiment with these abilities, use them on yourself to overcome environmental challenges, and fulfill your clients' requests.

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For this project, I took on the roles of project coordinator, 3D Artist (working alongside Nebulyne), and Environment Artist.

I absolutely loved pouring my imagination into creating an environment that truly inspired me. Throughout our playtesting sessions, we noticed that players often got lost, struggled to distinguish different areas, or felt that the environment became repetitive.

To solve this, I introduced a biome-based approach, using distinct color palettes to define each area. This made navigation much more intuitive and helped players easily recognize and remember the different zones.

ZibZib taught me an incredible amount about 3D modeling, but even more about optimization, topology, and UV mapping. It was essential to keep our meshes as lightweight as possible by minimizing triangle counts in order to maintain strong performance. Clean and "well-organized" UVs were just as important for the hand-painted texturing stage (all hand-painted textures were done by Nebulyne).

Once I finished modeling an asset, I focused on creating its UVs before exporting the model to Procreate (which we used for hand painting) and check the UVs. This workflow allowed us to verify that the UVs were clean and significantly saved time for the painting process.
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Overall, this project helped me grow in every aspect : 3D modeling, optimization, communication, time management, teamwork, and workflow.

I was also incredibly happy to work alongside such an amazing team. Their talent and dedication made this project both a great success and an unforgettable experience (even if we were sometimes on the verge of losing our minds lol) !
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Finally, here's the trailer we created as part of another course (it's in French, sorry), so you can see the final result : our game !!
I hope you'll enjoy discovering our project and maybe you'll even feel tempted to let Mr. Meeni exploit you too ? :)

- Giva