Meet Melee Wretch
Character Art by John DeRiggi
Wretches are monstrous mutated soldiers.
Original Concept Art by Alx Preston
Meet Leaper
Character Art by Jack Covell
Leapers are rare prototype soldiers who have undergone body modification experiments.
(top) Original Concept Art by Alx Preston; (bottom) Final Concept Art by Isaak Ramos
Our Character Art Process + Inspirations
John DeRiggi, Lead Character Artist, shares a bit about the character art process:
Heart Machine has a history of creating vibrant, colorful worlds that often deviate from current games. True to this goal, Hyper Light Breaker characters are inspired by traditional cel animation like Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli combined with a watercolor painting approach. Hopefully you can see this in the concepts and 3D models of the Melee Wretch and Leaper enemies.
A key ingredient here is the character’s material and its reaction to light. Games can sometimes use materials included with a game engine but often a custom material is needed to achieve the game’s artistic vision. Since graphics programmers and technical artists create the code behind materials, a custom material from scratch requires their time.
Because we are still a smaller studio, our technical resources are often constrained, and we could not devote this larger chunk of custom material time on Breaker. We are therefore using a new material on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, called Stylized Rendering System. This gives us the base for our cel-shaded look in various light and shadow conditions.
Our character art team can then customize this material and create our cel-shaded, watercolor look with a combination of hand-painted and procedural textures in Substance 3D Painter. This tool allows us to paint like traditional artists in 3 dimensions on a sculpture but do so digitally in our intended style goals for Breaker. When these textures combine with the cel-shaded material properties, we are able to achieve a really fun result!
What’s up Next?
On the rigging / animation side, we’ll be sharing soon what Chris Bullock, Lead Animator, and his team worked based on these characters, all the decisions and trade-offs that had to be considered. Stay tuned!