Scarlet Rose

She/Her

Games · Graphics · Design

About

I'm an aspiring game developer currently studying game design at South Gloucestershire and Stroud College. I particularly focus my studies towards game mechanics, UI/UX and tech art. I'm most experienced with Unreal Engine, but I also have experience with Unity, Godot and GameMaker Studio.I also create pixel art, animated wallpapers for Wallpaper Engine and sometimes music. Formally, I was a competitive DOOM Eternal player, featured on Bethesda's Friday Night Fights program as Miss Heartbeat. I'm always trying to learn and improve at what I do with a positive attitude, whether it's design, programming or gaming.

Portfolio

Top Projects

Other Work

Accessibility has always been one of my core design principles, so I took great care to consider the effects of different colour deficiencies when designing the pods. I compensated for the red-green confusion by using different tones for each pod.

Crash Course

Crash Course was a small game project I worked on in order to learn Unreal Engine before I started studying games design at college. The aim of the project was to create a game all about limitations, so I replicated the style of one of the most limited yet successful games consoles: the original Gameboy, also known as the Dot Matrix Game.

• Play on itch.io

Gameplay

Visual Design

The visuals were built to consider every limitation of the DMG console - most notably the colour palette and screen resolution, but also draw limits, tile sizes and even tile maps.
Aseprite was my tool of choice to create the art assets as it features many tools to assist with tiling and colour management. A specialized music sequencing program called hUGETracker was used to create faithful sound effects.

The title screen in particular takes inspiration from the parallax scrolling methods seen in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and "Oh!" by Snorpung.

Gallery

Further Information

Project Bloom

This project was my first attempt to introduce procedural animation to my UI materials. It was produced in only two weeks as part of a college unit with the theme of environmentalism. It is loosely based on a simple game concept I came up with for the theme, but the gameplay ideas were only an excuse to design the UI.My aim for this project was to develop my UI material skills that I initially gained while working on my Pentacle Menu project with a stronger visual style and gameplay-oriented design.

• Try on itch.io

Paint Material Function

The UI relies on a material function I created that allows shapes to be rendered as flowing paint using SDFs. This central function supports a number of parameters which offer full customisation of colour, outline thickness and even paint style.

Health System

The player's health is represented by a flower, which blooms when at max health, but will wilt away when damage is taken.

Each of the ten petals represents 10% of the player's health, while the stamen in the middle also changes colour according to the total value.

Ability System

Each of the five abilities is represented by a colourful pod growing from the plant's stalk. Individual pods are customised using material instances to add unique icon textures and colour palettes for each ability.

The pods become ripe and full while the ability is active, and shrink when used - regrowing while the corresponding ability is on cooldown.

Reticule System

I also created a dynamic reticule system similar to many first person shooters using my paint rendering function.

The player's accuracy is represented through the space between the crosshairs.

Mutiple styles and parameters are included to support customisation and contextual changes.

Further Information

Be aware that some documents were written specifically for college work and may not always provide full context. They may also be slightly out-of-date, as I often update my projects after the official work has been completed.

Pentacle Menu

This project is a full main menu system built using the Common UI plugin for Unreal Engine. The goal was to use UI materials to make a fully immersive interface experience, inspired by the sixth console generation.My work on this system marked the point when I started specialising into UI/X design and technical art. I've learnt more from working on this project compared to any of my other works so far.

• Try on itch.io

Material Coding

This was my first dive into material code, but many of the concepts I learnt over my work on the materials felt natural to me due to my previous work with image editing and VFX.

The bulk of my work on materials was dedicated to Signed Distance Fields (SDFs), which allowed me to render complicated shapes using mathematical funtions instead of textures.

Main Menu Stack

The main menu stack is the heart of the project, featuring six buttons each forming a section of a pentagram. Combined with the pentacle ring for additional information and padding, multiple iterations of the menu can be stacked onto each other to create an immersive navigation experience.

The menu system is fully animated and works seamlessly with mouse, keyboard and gamepad input and even includes dynamic button prompts.

Flyout Sub-Menus

In addition to the main stack, I created the flyout menu system to deal with more advanced controls such as checkboxes, sliders and multiple-choice options. These menus can handle an infinite number of options using a scrolling list.

The flyout system was made to be as simple and extensible as possible to streamline the design process of each sub-menu.Using named slots, it was possible to extend the functionality of each button with additional widgets.

Further Information

Be aware that some documents were written specifically for college work and may not always provide full context. They may also be slightly out-of-date, as I often update my projects after the official work has been completed.

En Garde

En Garde is a small gameplay prototype for a multiplayer fighting game based entirely on fencing. It was my first foray into 3D animation, despite initially being a gameplay-focused project.

• Play on itch.io

Gameplay

The gameplay was built to emulate real rulesets for épée fencing. Instead of a health system, the game counts points for each individual hit scored by each player and the first to 15 points wins the bout.The controls were initially designed to be more complex, but were scaled back to fit a tight schedule after the lofty animation workload became apparent.

Players can move along the piste, perform a thrusting attack or parry. Successful parries deflect incoming attacks, stun attackers, and allow defenders to riposte.

Animation and Modelling

Several animations were created for the project using Autodesk Maya and implemented using Unreal's animation blueprint system. Animatons draw reference from a variety of real-life sources, inlcuding footage from the Olympic Games and training material.

UI Design

The entire UI was created in only a couple of days and was based on the score display from the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games using only the default fonts included with UE5.

The HUD displays information on the current round, round time and player points, all of which are completely functional within the gamemode itself. The score counters even change during overtime to highlight the player with priority.

The UI is fully animated to make transitioning between rounds as seamless as possible.

Further Information

Be aware that some documents were written specifically for college work and may not always provide full context. They may also be slightly out-of-date, as I often update my projects after the official work has been completed.

Contact