New Island Buddies
Hey! Just wanted to quickly share something we've been cooking up lately:
Our islands are no longer deserted, but are now full of fun and zany inhabitants to interact with!
We have always wanted to have a playful mix of animal types to bring cool and unique personalities to each of the characters you come across on the island and make it feel like a thriving paradise that you can really call home.
Because we're a small team, we have to think smart and see how we can solve this problem of having lots of different base animal looks, while also finding the time to tick off all of our other art, design, and programming goals. It's a challenging problem, but one we knew we had to ace.
Modular characters
One big step we made was designing character objects to be modular, this means we put time into developing tools to swap out character models, heights, animations, clothes and hats! This is an awesome feature because it means we can have super quick character placement and customisation.
The next step will be adding in better eyes and blinking, plus some new poses!
And then, of course, new animals! Maybe some reptiles are on the horizon! Let us know what you'd be most eager for too :))
But so far we have ducks, rabbits, bears, rhinos and raccoons. Here's them in action, changing procedurally thanks to the NPC customiser tool:
We're also experimenting with hats, holding items, and... weirdly misplaced moustaches for good measure.
Here's how the component currently looks in Unity:
Universal UVs and texturing
One big creative decision we made, was centralising all game textures to use one single palette! Then the artists can quickly assign colours to NPCs by allocating ones from them on their UV islands.
What this means, is we spend next to no time texturing and can focus on making more models and characters for the game, so it will mean we can add content much faster at a small detail sacrifice.
This is a trick we're using in general for all models; so be prepared for an incoming main character makeover.
Unique Speech bubbles
We've also started working on having speech bubbles for individual characters. It's still pretty work in progress, but it's coming along nicely, we think. The idea is for them to be nice and cozy looking! Soon we will also be adding dialogue options.
We're also using ref charts for these to give some variations and uniqueness to conversations. Here's a quick palette our 2D artist Kielo drew up for us:
Racing
We've made pretty nice progress on racing too, where you can challenge extra sporty locals of Dewdrop to runs across the island. Plan is to make these work with gliding and swimming too, so we can make them extra epic!
Until Next time!
And that's it! This was fun, so will promise to make more soon :))
Feedback is always welcome, and may get to us faster on our discord.
Take it easy! - Harry
