Monopoly – Monstropolis

In 2020 we worked on our first Halloween board for Monopoly and we were able to go a bit more fantastical than the previous boards, mixing the city of Los Angeles with a monster themed Halloween.

You’re in for a frightfully good time! In Monstropolis, creatures from your Halloween dreams live in a new, reimagined Los Angeles. Prepare to be horrified by the cost of rent as you build your spooky empire! Will your opponents flee before your wealth, or sneak into the lead with a shock purchase?

This was a fun board to work on, we were allowed to extrapolate a bit more on the buildings and animations and I was also handed the task to keep it all under our performance target so I would like go go over some of the challenges and solutions.

::Fog

The fog was done by a piece of shader that could be added to all of the different shaders in the scene (that needed the fog effect). Shader Graph’s subshaders were very helpful to achieve that, so instead of editing a few shaders every time we needed to change the fog (as there were lots of iterations to it throughout the theme’s development) I only had to change one subshader containing all of the fog functionality and it updates all of the shaders using it.

::Lightning

The occasional lightning would add a lot to the theme’s mood, it had to be simple but with a good control and some variation. I used the help of subshaders again in addition to some control in the scene through locators and simple scripts. There are few locators in the scene that determines the direction and distance of the lightning, a script runs through a curve (picks a random one from a few variations we made) to pass the intensity to the shaders through a global value (affecting every shader that receives the lightning). Hopefully it’s easier to understand in this clip.

Achieving this result in game (here I reduced the time between the strikes though):

::Bats

The bats use pretty much the same technique as the birds from the Paris board, which I previously talked about in this other post.

::Blackout

We initially wanted to have an option to have some occasional energy blackout, so I added another global parameter to the shaders plus a script to control it. It also uses one of the UVs to add some variation to the order the lights go off as it didn’t look good having them all at the same time.

In the end the blackout was a bit too much and wasn’t fully added to the game apart from one situation…

::Main Lightning

This board was the first one to have the city being affected by a game’s action. Whenever a player is sent to jail the tallest building in the city is struck by a lightning, causing a short blackout and scaring some bats away from the building.

Every Monopoly theme is the result of teamwork, very often the same asset gets iterations from different artists. I’m showing here as I’ve been responsible for directing the 3D and tech art but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what each one did nor can I take full credit for it.

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