You must groom your party before venturing forth.
Today’s Field Notes Friday is about Brightfall’s character creation - what you’ll be able to customise, and how a feature that looks simple on the surface is actually built in practice.
Grab a tea or coffee, we’ve brought a lot of pictures!
It starts with…
Valheim. V Rising. Planet Crafter. Len’s Island. DYSMANTLE. Enshro…
Yes, if you ever wondered: in gamedev, you can absolutely play games at work.
It is simply called Research.
Making games requires playing games, at least in our opinion. Because Brightfall is a new genre for us, this stage mattered even more than usual. Good research helps us focus on what actually feels intuitive to players.
Some questions we asked:
Do these games even have character customisation? If yes, what works well? What doesn’t? what is clear from a player’s perspective, what makes you want to smash your controller out of the window? How do these work, do they have sliders, how you can earn a million dollars, wait what, are you still reading? comment if you do!
Starting place - general brief
Will it Work? Enter the Prototype
The process doesn’t start in the engine, but on paper. Once the team agrees on the general direction, the designer prepares a schematic. In the future, these will be interactive elements on your screen.
Then, it goes to the programmers, who start coding and prepare the first version in the game engine - on the right. The resulting prototype is a thing of beauty.
To be serious, this is not the phase where things are meant to look pretty. The task is to make it exist first. It can work well later, and look great in the third step.
Bonus:
Our QA team gets the first experience with the prototype, which means they also get the first chance to discover new features. For example, as you can see above, our characters were T-posing to assert dominance in the main menu and character creation.
Each iteration and element gets to go through multiple rounds of testing. This way, we can rest assured that the finished game will get to you in the best possible shape.
Here are some real-life examples from our Jira:
This one was atmospheric, but also made it look a little like we had quietly pivoted into making a new Assassin’s Creed.
Our testers prepare tickets with documentation for every bug they find, so programmers can fix them more easily.
These bugs can also be a great time to reflect and iterate on the original design. For example, beards for female characters were not part of the original plan. But after seeing the bug, we decided to keep the option, only disabled by default.
This decision comes from wanting to give you freedom to choose what you want. If someone wants to walk into the darkness with a magnificent beard, who are we to stop them?
Iteration 2: Is it going to work well?
In the meantime, the designer refined the original layout and prepared a more complete schematic for the programmers. This gave the team a clearer version of the screen: where the categories should go, how you will move between them, what information needs to be visible.
Then the programmers built the second version. You can already see it becoming more readable. The screen has better structure, the flow is clearer, and the chance to get the character you want is higher. Assuming you want a character with a beard.
Because the beards decided to take over Brightfall. They appeared in every tab and became impossible to take off.
But wait!
We forgot about the characters themselves. The characters themselves also need to be prepared from scratch: models, meshes, body parts, hair, facial hair, scars, tattoos… All these elements need to work together.
Our artists also start with research. That means a lot of references, from classical paintings to other games, historical clothing, old portraits, and photos.
It is 1666. The Great Plague has just ended. England is exhausted. So our characters could not look like clean fantasy heroes who just stepped out of a perfume commercial. They are unlucky souls thrown into a place the Crown would rather forget. So we looked more at rougher shapes: shirts, coats, caps, worn fabric, simple cuts.
After getting the characters, the art team focused on details, for example preparing scars and tattoos.
They looked at old carved symbols, stone inscriptions, ritual patterns, sailor marks,everything that says “this person has a past.” This is the result:
It will look pretty in Iteration 3
We’re close to the finish now. After multiple rounds of back and forth between testers and programmers, it’s finally time for a pretty GUI.
Our art team started turning the functional version into something we can present to you.
A character creation screen has to do a surprisingly delicate job. It should let you focus on your outcast, understand your options quickly, and stay in the mood of the game without turning the whole process into a boss fight.
Here’s what they came up with:
When programmers finally put it into the game, all that was left is for the testers to have fun:
Small snapshot of the combinations they had to test. The page went on and on....
🙏
Now, you can finally customize your character:
You can change gender, skin color, set up a face and hair for your character. There are also tattoo and scar options to chose.
It means…
it’s time for Iteration 4!
Anyway, let us know if you enjoyed this kind of devlog ❤️ And remember to follow our page so you don’t miss playtest announcements and upcoming news!
Usually, you only see the final screen, but behind that screen is a chain of research, design, tech, art, bugs, and testing. But at every stage, our main goal is to make our game as comfortable and clear for you as possible.
Warm regards from Toruń, yours truly
~Dark Point Games Team