Hello from the Chaos Bringer Development Team! :)
Building the Four Heroes · Part 1 of 6
First off, we're so sorry it's taken us so long to return with another update;; But fear not! Development has continued throughout the silence, and we finally have some excitingly great news to share: We finally have an artist on our team!! Until now, we'd been dividing the visual work among the team as best we could (it was a bit of a struggle)! But now, having someone totally focused on art means we can shape the cast and the world with MUCH more consistency as well as share more of that process with you! So please look forward to all the updates! ^^
Over the next six dev notes, we'll take a closer look at how one shared character framework grew into four very distinct heroes. We'll start out with the character and equipment pipeline, but no worries! Each character's individual stories will come in time! For now, we want to take a deep dive into the practical work behind the cast.
When we began building the playable cast of Chaos Bringer, we already had a fairly practical modular character framework. In a nutshell, this included interchangeable body pieces, equipment meshes, and a shared animation foundation. That gave us a very strong production base just starting out, but it wasn't quite enough to flesh out four uniquely distinct heroes.
Our first task was to work out how much individuality we could introduce without breaking the fundamental systems that make equipment swapping possible. We knew that Daisy, Melania, Ysilune, and Joyton needed vastly different silhouettes and proportions, but the armor still had to follow the same skeleton and behave predictably when they moved.
One of our early implementations involved adjusting each character's build through the Animation Blueprint. Scaling selected bones allowed us to test broader shoulders, different limb proportions, and distinct body shapes while keeping the underlying rig compatible with modular equipment. It was a very useful prototype because we could see the characters diversify quickly without us having to rebuild every single armor piece, which was a lifesaver!
What's more, dabbling more into this experiment exposed the next challenge: proportions. *Dun dun dunnnnnn!!* When we modified character proportions, we ABSOLUTELY needed to make sure that these changes reflected well in each static pose! The reason being is that these poses directly affect animation, weapon alignment, facial rigs, and even the way armor sits on the body. Essentially, the more character-specific a hero's rig became, the more carefully those systems had to meet in the middle.
That balance via tension has shaped our character workflow ever since. Fortunately, we found a way to preserve a shared technical foundation in building and supporting a character's base framework. Based on that, we're free to add sparks of personal identity through facial details, expressions, hair, body shape, textures, and animations! Some sliiiiight differences can still live in the rig, but others are better baked into the character data or handled by materials!
We can confidently say that this was the point where the cast stopped being four variations of a generic template and started becoming four heroes we could recognize at a glance, and we're pretty proud of that! :D
In the next few notes, we'll share how those early body tests and all the experimentation led into the development and fine-tuning of Daisy's face! We'll also take a look at the first full cast lineup and the MANY equipment problems created by making the heroes genuinely different! (It's funny to take a look back now, but then, not so much!)
As we close out our first dev note in a long while, we wanna say that though this is but the beginning of a closer behind-the-scenes look into Chaos Bringer, we're so glad to have you along for the ride!
In our next dev note, we'll take a closer look at the shared framework and how we adapted it to fit the character who became Daisy. Smol spolier alert: It was a VERY long search to define a face that truly felt like his own! xD
Thank you again for joining us in our journey and reading along!
See you in the next dev note! ;)
Sincerely,
The Chaos Bringer Development Team