Bard

A doozy of an update!

So I’ve decided to start my side-scroller project! Although I really enjoy working on my Bard game, I wanted to try something new and this seemed like the perfect opportunity!

After some head bashing and research, I decided that this project would be themed around a Ye Olde setting, which starts in a fishing village. I knew from the start I wanted a lighthouse to be the aim of the level, so I based everything around that. With this in mind I did some research into games that follow a similar theme and created some moodboards to help broaden my idea.

From this research I started to mock-up the game in UE4, I started by adding in a double jump and a wall jump. Character movement is also very crucial to this games design, so I changed how quickly the player can move and how high she can jump. 

Wall Jump

Then came the tougher stuff, I put in some attacks that affect the player, making them hop and jump back when attacked. As I couldn't visualise how she would navigate the level until the character was designed, I had to wait until I'd modelled, rigged and animated her.

From here I needed a character, I asked Becky to help concept the protagonist. The character design had to look rogue-ish as I thought it'd be fun to make a dual wielding character. I gave her loose instructions and she came back with this:

With these quick sketches, I 3D modelled a character that was very much out of my comfort zone, I'm used to making float-y armed characters that have a large head. I made two copies of this model and squished her to make the style more charming. 

After UVing the smaller one, I set this to Becky to texture whilst I rigged the character. Below are some WIP shots of the texture work: 

Two days passed and I was still trying to get the skeleton to work, I had to decide to make some changes to this design. I ran into trouble with making the hips animate right and with a deadline looming I'd rather have this done. So I went back to what I know, and tweaked the design to fit with what I'm comfortable with. 

Then came some problems with the style. It was really difficult to translate the poofy pants into the new style and sadly they had top get scrapped. After some humming and ha-ing Becky managed to find a design that looked cool and worked! So off I went to model it!

Here's a screenshot of an older model: