Character design in Kalaban

Hello there, fellow readers!

I've talked about monster design before, but I've never gone into the detail of creating a NPC. These are the non-playable characters that roam the game world, and who you interact with.

Colored illustrations of Pena and Cultist henchmen.

The process begins with either me or Tuukka writing a simple description of the character. Who they are, what's their purpose and what they do in the story. Then, our character designer Vesa-Pekka takes the description and draws a sketch art based on the description. If the sketch art is fitting, and matches the soul of the character, we move on to the illustration.

All the colored illustrations in the game are done by me. I take the drawing to Photoshop, and create a new picture based on its design. I don't do a direct line drawings, but I do want the art to closely represent the sketch art.

Sketch art by Vesa-Pekka on the left, and my illustration on the right.

 Actual textures used on the prerendered model.

After the 2D illustration is finished, I take the picture and create the in-game model based on its look. I use the excellent MakeHuman software in the creation of human characters, as modeling them all by hand would take way too much time and effort. After all, our core team consists of four developers, and all the other guys in the team have other day jobs aside from the game development. I'm the only one working on the game full-time, so that brings an extra challenge to the mix.

Prerendered sprites of the model, with correct lighting and shadows.

Close-up of the prerendered model.

All the textures on the models are original paintings, so that they follow the hand-drawn art style. When viewed separately, they are quite simplistic. I've figured, that you don't need a huge amount of detail, when the finished model is going to be a 128 pixel wide sprite on the screen.

When the 3D model has been finished and animated, I render the animations to separate images. Then I take the images to Photoshop, add shadows, shading and color correction to them. After that I export the sequence to the game-ready sprites. Those sprites then become active objects inside the game, which you can interact with. 

Paula's sprite in real-time.

Kaarina encounter and dialogue in-game.

The length of the process varies a lot. The illustrations and textures take about a day to finish, and sometimes I can get a whole character done during one workday. With all the animations, tweaks, etc. it might take two days. If there are some necessary corrections, the process might take up to 2-4 days total. And that's just the visual side. 

Then adding the gameplay element takes a lot more time. That really varies, and is usually a process of weeks or months, and is done in tandem with other development. The writing process behind the NPCs also varies a lot. Some characters were written in a day, others were a result of several months of planning. When you finally see it in the game and interacting with other elements, you can get into the fine tweaking. 

Cultist henchmen sprites. One of the few hand-crafted human models in the game.

NPC encounter at the purification plant.

The more you have elements interacting with each others, the more complex it gets. When you only have a couple of enemies running around with one NPC, things are fairly simple. But when you have a wide cast of characters with their own quests, side objectives and behaviors, it's much harder to keep track of. 

But that's the whole beauty of developing an open-ended game. The fact that you get to change the character's fate is an exciting feature. And once you've tasted that player-driven narrative, you can't go back to simple arcade games. 

Friday diaries #2

Hello!

I did have a plan to keep these Friday diaries weekly, but then stuff happened, and I didn't have time to do one last week. Soooo... Here we are!

Today we'll have a look into the creation of non-playable characters. In addition to the ravenous mutants, you will come accross some normal human beings too. They're survivors, who have fought against the outbreak, or by some random accident been spared by the monsters.

 

The npc in question today is Mikko the bartender in scene 7. He's a guy who's been through a rough patch, but despite that, or because of it he has survived this long. The character creation in the game always begins with a rough sketch, and then a painted version to give it depth and color. After you have the shape and look figured out, you get into the modeling, and finally of course animation. In the creation of human characters I've decided to use the help of the excellent MakeHuman freeware program.

I'll try to keep you updated frequently from now on. We've currently set an insane milestone to have all the scenes done by the end of summer 2016. We have scenes 1-5 and 7 under construction, and I just began putting the sixth scene together in Photoshop. So, we still have six whole scenes to create from scratch before that...

Anyways, thanks for tuning in and see you soon!

Enemy profile: The Bruiser

Hello and welcome back!

This week we'll take a look at the first foe which you'll encounter in Kalaban. It's a hybrid of a man and a canine creature. The 'Bruiser' has no ranged attack. It tries to run you down and starts tearing through your flesh if it does.

As you might've heard, the development of Kalaban officially began in January 2015. Before that we tried to create a sidescroller prototype with simplistic action-adventure elements. But that version seriously lacked meaningful and fun gameplay. So, we decided to take the perspective to this topdown/isometric view, where you can see the action from above, and the enemies can creep on you from all the different angles, instead of just two.

 'Bruiser' has gone through many iterations during the development, since it is the first enemy you see in the game. This current version is its fifth iteration. I've experimented with prerendered graphics during its development, and tried to emulate the hand-drawn style of Bob with various results. The current look of the monster is finally aligned with the overall art direction in the game.

 

When you're creating character graphics and animation, you have to be very conscious of what kind of look you want to achieve. Is your character wobbly? Does it have a limp? Or does it move with a robotic precision? Does it look around and is it aware of its environment? Does the character posses wisdom or intelligence?

The Bruiser is a blunt and mindless mutant, which stumbles around, but slashes its foes with terrifying strength. Its appearance might fool you to think it's almost harmless.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

Enemy profile: The Spitter

Howdy folks! It's been a while, so we figured we should post a new update. Let me present a new monster to you - The Spitter!




Designing a character always begins with a sketch; an illustration or just a rough scribble. This particular monster is supposed to be a half-snake and half-human. It spits corrosive acid, hence the name. Our character designer, Vesa-Pekka did the rough sketch, and I made the painted version above. The illustration gives you a basic idea of the character; its poses and the general colours.


The snake which inspired this monster is an adder, which can actually be found from the Finnish nature, and it's one of the only venomous species we have in here. Although Kalaban is set in a fantastical alternate universe, it should be grounded in reality somehow. I like to compare the game's fictional lore to Watchmen, which clearly mirrors the political atmosphere of the era it depicts, but also takes many liberties, like adding sci-fi and comic book elements. Our game deals with a simpler story of course; mutant outbreak in nineties Finland.



Unlike the animations of our main hero, Bob, the enemies will be done in 3D, and then prerendered into 2D sprites. It would simply just be too laborious to animate all the in-game characters by hand. That's why I built this hi-poly model of the character. I posed the model for the animations and then shot it from different angles. I tried my best to simulate the painted, hand-drawn look.


Thanks for tuning in! We've had a long break from Kalaban partially because we've been working on Neurotron, our pocket RPG for Android devices. And also because we've done a huge rehaul to the game overall. All the previous code was essentially scrapped. Now that Neurotron is moving along nicely, we can also get Kalaban back on track.