Things have been busy since the Scape win in April, and in the middle of that, Students Against Spooky Stuff got its first real production help. I want to write about it properly, because two people made a few months of this project genuinely lovely, and I want that on the record.
Why I said yes
A local game design program reached out asking if any devs in the area would take on a couple of students for internships, hands-on art work in exchange for course credit and something real for their portfolios. My first instinct was to say no. I've been protective of SASS, in the specific way you get protective of something small and unfinished that still lives mostly in your own head.
I ended up saying yes anyway, mostly because a game literally called Students Against Spooky Stuff, turning actual students loose on it, felt too fitting to pass up. I'm very glad I did.
What they actually built
One student, a character artist, took the descriptions and mock images and turned them into the actual 3D cast. Every main character in the Slushie Specter chapter went from a paragraph I'd written to full models, then a look I could point at and say "yes, that's her" instead of just describing her. The other, our creature artist, picked up retopology on those models, taking the sculpted, high-detail versions and rebuilding them as clean, game-ready meshes. Watching a character go from a paragraph in a document to an actual face in a few weeks was one of the best parts of this project so far.
While they worked, I spent most of my own time somewhere else entirely, finally sitting down with Unreal for real, so that whatever they built wouldn't just sit in a folder forever.
Thank you, both of you. This chapter is better because you.
- Mikey