Yes, We’re Still Alive…
Hey you misfits! How are things? Going swimmingly I hope.
I’m sorry we’ve neglected you lately, but quite frankly, the road to final is an arduous one and we’ve been busy beavers over the past while. My apologies. I’m so sorry that I took time out of creating Matinee and other Kismet sequences to talk a bit about what we’re working on!
But let’s talk about something cool. Let’s talk about characters. Truthfully, we haven’t revealed much about the look of Hench over the development cycle. Part of it was the amount of work equaled the blog being pushed back. But the other part is in our cel-shaded art style. Before I unveiled the style of the game, I wanted it in-game first, with the proper lighting and cel-shaded techniques that Thomas Kobelsky was so kind in providing us with last post.
When you think of an Unreal modification, a certain expectation pops up in your head. It looks and feels a certain way. What we’ve done is a modification of not only gameplay or camera, but visual style as well. Trust me, these characters don’t look anything like a typical Unreal 3 modification!
As you can tell here, our style is very different! This is our main character, Hench, holding his demonic ghost-eating sack (which unfortunately has no texture on it in this picture). We decided to use the Krall animation rig from UT3. The crouch run of the Krall really was in-line with how we wanted Hench to move. As Thomas mentioned in another post, the cel-shading on the characters is custom. Thomas got help from many sources, but ultimately he tweaked his own numbers to come up with a dynamite style.
This is our Food Ghost, Mercedes. She is called the food ghost because her energy feeds Hench’s master. When Hench delivers these ghosts to his Master, her energy is consumed and the Master ‘grows’ and uses the environment of the train yard to do so.
Mercedes is designed to have the appearance of a little girl, lost in the etheral world. Hench’s job is to capture and feed her to his Master, so naturally, like a child, she is devious and hard to catch.
And now we come to Jet, our harasser ghost. This guy is looking to stop you at any cost. When Hench is parading around the train yard with a sackful of ghosts, Jet will actively seek you out, stun you, and release any ghosts you had in your sack. A tad menacing, don’t you think? Jet is designed to be the foil to the player. He is what prevents the player from capturing Mercedes ghosts. We have a ghost to achieve the objective with Mercedes, but Jet is the opposite of that, and provides an obstacle for Hench.
Now we come to Tank, my personal favorite enemy. His single objective is to get to the Master and drain his energy, thus making him hungrier. He is pissed because he has an ax in his head, but his beef isn’t with you, but with your crazy Master. Tank will ignore you completely and go straight for the Master in the hunt for his power.
Tank is primarily designed around a rhinoceros and I personally dig the design by our Creative Director, Mark N. Barker. In fact, he created (or helped create) the designs of our characters and they definitely fit with our style.
The only character left is the Master. He is Hench’s master and he you must feed ghosts to him. This picture shows the general idea of the Master becoming built using elements of the environment, like train cars, steam engines, and other things you’d find in a train yard. Once he has some crazy flames and debris swirling around him, he’ll look really awesome and massive.
Well, that’s all I really got for ya at the moment. Check back for more updates post-Beta and closer to the Final date!
Cheers,
Kyle Jensen, Project Manager
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