Cinemachine – Mars Mission – Katabasis

Cutscene

Cutscene is an important idea in the video game. It is a sequence of animations or videos with zero or limited player control. Cutscenes serve the roles of telling the story, providing transition in playing flow. In the early years, for the better visual effect, most of the cutscenes are pre-rendered video that interrupting player’s interaction. With the development of graphics technology, more game developers use real-time cutscenes that provide transition with no gap at all. This technology of real-time rendering increases the immersive experience, in the game industry, people call it the “flow”.

This project is developed on Unity engine. We are aware of the importance of “camera language”, therefore, for better implementation of camera actions, we use the technology of Cinemachine package provided by Unity.

Story

This project is developed for the organization Katabasis, who is maintaining partnership with NC State. As part of the requirements for our course projects of CSC 486, Katabasis expects the game with educational purposes to children and the ultimate mission is to facilitate learning. We decided to make the cutscene in a technology topic, to tell the story of aerospace mission.

Art Design

3D models in the project are purchased from Unity Asset Store. Credit to:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vehicles/space/simple-space-cartoon-assets-82496

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vehicles/space/low-poly-rocket-launch-complex-pack-177807

Animation and Timeline

The animation in Unity is based on the key frame on the Timeline, where the transform of the object, such as position, rotation and space are defined in time. Timeline also triggers the activated state of object and scripts.

Scenes Setup

This 2 minutes cutscene consists of 4 individual scenes built by different developers:

Launch Scene
Earth Scene
Mars Scene
Landing Scene

Credits

Asset Provider

MagixBox
Synty Studios

Launch Scene

Leo Li

Earth Scene

Eve Xie
Dongming Wu

Mars Scene

Dongming Wu

Landing Scene

Eve Xie

Instructor

Dr. Arnav Jhala

Contact Us

Leo Li – yibinleoo@gmail.com

Eve Xie – jxie22@ncsu.edu

Dongming Wu – dwu6@ncsu.edu