The main character of our game is a physiologically perfect (ideal) human being. This is not a metaphor — it is the literal foundation of her story. She is beautiful, perfectly built, strong, and nearly two meters tall.
Our goal was to emphasize this not only in her model, but — most importantly — in her movement. Despite her condition, she moves quickly, confidently, and gracefully.
For the Nameless One, we created more than 200 (!) animation clips — all hand-animated, frame by frame, with attention to even the smallest details. As references, we looked to NieR: Automata and Stellar Blade. However, as you might imagine, there is one crucial nuance in our case — pregnancy.
And that changes everything. During pregnancy, a woman’s center of gravity shifts, the spine curves more, the silhouette changes, and the abdomen limits the range of leg movement, among many other factors. Since the game industry offers almost no examples of characters like this, we had to invent — and repeatedly rework — every animation from scratch.
We drew inspiration from videos of pregnant athletes. Their silhouettes and movement patterns became key references for us. In addition, we worked with a world fitness champion and professional posing coach who was pregnant at the time. She recorded reference footage for us and provided invaluable feedback and consultations throughout the animation process.
As a result, we built a detailed and aesthetically refined character movement system. And we are not stopping here — we plan to continue developing and improving the visual expressiveness of the Nameless One.
A tremendous amount of work was also done to integrate these animations with the game’s physics and control systems — but that is a story for another time.