Billy Borrow

Billy Borrow is an aspiring 3D artist, specialising in environment art. For his project 'Timebuilder' Borrow has displayed a variety of skills such as 3D modelling, texturing, level design, blueprint programming and procedural generation. Using a combination of industry-standard tools such as Maya, Substance Painter, Houdini and the Unreal Engine 4, Borrow has created one game level, on the theme of time travel, where you need to find the original form of the buildings and restore them to what they once were — all of this set in a post apocalyptic city.

Borrow is a hard working, resilient, team player and loves to try different types of software and technology. Borrow started his journey of game development in secondary school where his class got assigned a task to create a short video game in a couple of weeks. Borrow was able to create 3 levels of a space invader type game in the software GameMaker and won an award for the 'Funnest' game.

When Borrow was thinking of which college he wanted to go to he decided to give Game Design a chance. He went to BCE, learning how to use software such as Unity, Maya, Blender, Photoshop and later on going to university, learning Substance, Unreal 4 and finally Houdini for his Final Major Project. During his time at university Borrow has been working on indie projects as a passion with a group of friends, naming themselves as Kubota Productions, who have developed 4 projects.

https://glitchytoast.itch.io/

Diner Bar Room – This area is located at the Diner building, where you explore an American Diner, trying to get to root objectives of the game. Borrow was inspired by American diners and managed to produce a unique layout for these environment models. Every asset in the room has around 20,000 vertices, constructed in Maya with between 1k and 2k textures.

https://glitchytoast.itch.io/

Kitchen Room – This area of the game is the diner kitchen. Getting source material for the kitchen was more difficult. The room itself has around 20,000 vertices, made in Maya and has about 2k textures.

https://glitchytoast.itch.io/

Procedural buildings – For this area of the game Borrow aimed to achieve a realistic scale for the buildings placed around the level. Borrow wanted to use an engine called Houdini — he had some issues with the shader system but managed to complete it — every building has around 200,000 - 300,000 primitives or vertices and the textures vary between 1k-2k. Borrow also managed to use part of the fracturing system in Houdini for the main building walls and pillars.

The storage room is the entry area where the player gets into the diner building. They would need to go through a broken wall, through the storage room, up stairs and through doors. Once inside the diner the player can rebuild the wall they entered by. Overall each asset in the room has 1k vertices with a 1k texture made in Maya.

https://glitchytoast.itch.io/

The storage room is the entry area where the player gets into the diner building. They would need to go through a broken wall, through the storage room, up stairs and through doors. Once inside the diner the player can rebuild the wall they entered by. Overall each asset in the room has 1k vertices with a 1k texture made in Maya.

Gameplay Video – This video covers the mechanics of Timebuilder. The overview shows the pickup mechanic, slow down time mechanic, revert time mechanic — these were made in Unreal Engine 4.