Fiasco Restoration & Repair

2020-2023 / PC (Steam)

Role:
Designer

Date:
Q4 2020 – Q1 2023

Created In

Unity 3D, C#

Summary

Fiasco Restoration and Repair is a game about the delicate art of art restoration – and the many, many, MANY ways it can go wrong! Players step into the role of Antonio Fiasco, on his quest to restore the Mona Lisa – using only the finest assortment of random stuff his (parents’) garage has to offer!

Fiasco Restoration and Repair was a proof-of-concept project developed under a 5 person team at Fowl Machinations, from the end of 2020 to the start of 2023. Work focused on developing a Steam-and-Kickstarter-ready demo, with intent of seeking funding for additional development time. The final demo was released on Steam for PC in January 2023.

Project Details

I was the principal designer at Fowl Machinations for the duration of this project, and was in charge of the overall direction of gameplay. My design work on the project included:

  • Researching, Concepting & Prototyping
    • Learning about real-life art restoration
    • Testing ideas inspired by real-life processes in-engine
    • Seeing what did & didn’t translate to gameplay
  • Systems Design
    • Establishing player objectives
    • Plotting and testing control schemes
    • Setting up a gameplay loop
  • UI/UX
    • Communicating goals, controls, and progress through UI
    • Testing and iterating on game feel, controls
  • Level Design
    • Designing the layout of the play environment
    • Working with artists to plan level assets
  • Misc.
    • Collaboration with our artists, programmer, and producer
    • C# scripting on objective and item code
    • Work on rendering pipeline, visual effects

The gallery below contains images from various points in Fiasco’s development. For more details on everything that I did, select an image and open it’s description. Images go chronologically, left-to-right.

Document titled: Art Restoration Research. Last Update: 4 January 2021. Section under heading "By-Video Research" shows a picture of a youtube video, with a brown canvas on white paper background. Notes below read: "Blue Skies Smilin’ At Me - Baumgartner. Oil-on-canvas cleaning and restoration. Thick layers of grime & varnish give appearance of tonal paint. Resin degrades over time - turns yellow/brown, cloudy, cracks. Tinted glass effect. Removing grime with Q-tip reveals color below. Overpainted dark areas - done by an inexperienced conservator. New layers of oil atop the original. Color matched to dirty painting. Original paint missing? Gelled Solvent used to remove overpaint. Chemical, dangerous, requires eye covering."
Note page labelled "Summary Notes". Notes read: "Art restoration is, in many ways, a meeting point of art and science. There is a long history of attempts to conserve masterworks, going back to the 19th century - often with damaging results. Science has continued to expand and improve the field of art restoration - with many new technologies and techniques for identifying problems with works, and finding better ways of preserving them. Restoration & conservation are investigative processes. People have to identify the issues with paintings. Go through the steps required to properly prepare and restore the painting. Act ethically and maintain the original art while restoring." A small diagram from invaluable.com showing the common causes of paiting damage: Moisture, Light Exposture, Smoke or Air Pollution, Mold, Vandalism, and Accidental Contact.
A pale brown room with a tan floor. A square depicting the Mario sprite from the original Super Mario Bros. hovers in the center of the room, covered in layers of gray and brown. The area around mario's face has been partially scrubbed clean.
A yellow-framed painting, with the texture of a wooden pressboard. A stick figure with large muscles, a tophat, and a handlebar moustache flexes on the canvas.
Overhead, isometric snapshot of fiasco's garage level. The garage is an L shape, rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees, with the short side being the main "garage" area, and the long side a workshop/living space combo. All the shelves, tables, and fixtures are labelled with numbers for the original document.
An early-development screenshot of the fiasco garage enviroment, taken from the end of the living space hall. A blocky kitchen countertop lines the left side wall, while a top-loaded laundry machine and shelves line the right. The walls themselves are a blue paint color, which fades into a white drywall near the top. The floor is a stone grey. An empty easel is visible at the far end of the hall, surrounded by tall shelving units.
Left: a green cube hovering in a garage. Right: A grey Unity Editor window opened to a component labelled "Liquid Initializer". The selected colors in the editor reflect the color of the cube.
Left: A set of step by step instructions for a restoration. 1: Clean the painting, remove dust and dirt. 2: Restore the house (roof, front windows). 3: Restore the farmer (Head, Glasses, Shirt, Coat, Pitchfork, Hands). 4: Restore the Daughter (Head, Dress). On the right, the painting American Gothic is tinted a muddy brown color. A set of sky blue lines outline the features of the farmer mentioned in the instructions.
Left - an image of the Mona Lisa in the unity editor, with color pixels overlayed to indicate different regions of the face. Right: A close-up zoom on the real Mona Lisa's mouth, for color reference.
Image of a garage, overlayed with a red canvas. On the right, a simple diagram of a clipboard, with an image of the Mona Lisa, and a breakdown of the status of each part of the painting.
A brightly lit garage. On the right side of the screen, a player holds a clipboard, with details and images pertaining to the current restoration mission.
Player holds a bright blue paintbrush over a silver sink basin, half-filled with water. Text over a highlighted faucet handle reads "Faucet Handle - Turn On"
A translucent black screen overlayed over a garage scene. On the right are buttons leading to Steam, Discord, Kickstarter, and other links. On the right, a message reading "Welcome! Thanks for playing Fiasco Restoration & Repair! This is an early alpha demo. Some things might not work as expected, and others might be subject to change. Any issues or questions? Feel free to reach out to us through any of the channels on the left! Thanks for supporting us! - Fowl Machinations"

Documentation Examples

Additional Links and Downloads