April update - A bumpy ride
The ups and downs of character creation
Hey Life Simmers!
We’ve been talking for soooo long about this, but we finally did it!
We have finished our characters!
Thank you! Thank you! I’m proud of us as well!
It has been quite a ride to be honest! We started by designing them ourselves, going through a lot of versions in the process. And even though it wasn’t easy, we got to a version that we both liked. So we went on and animated the walking animations, made different poses, and started drawing clothes and hair.
You can hear the plot twist coming right? They were too small! 😭
They looked like they were a hobbit in a human house. And while that certainly has its charms, it’s not the look we were going for. And yes, we did measure and test in advance. But some things are really hard to see when the version isn’t final. Now y’all might think, that’s not a big deal… Can’t you just scale them? But if you only have 80 pixels, scaling them by 10% really deforms your drawing. So we ended up with this:
Yikes! 😱
This meant we’d have to do the whole process again. The drawing of the base model, the animations, the clothes… Truly the whole shebang!
We were discussing our next steps (and honestly gathering our courage) but then we saw these amazing characters Kaitsu had done for another project in their portfolio.
(Check out their art and their other characters at Artstation)
We fell in love immediately! So we reached out and started working with them. And I have to say, they created something better than we ever could have!
(Swimwear for SFW purposes 😅)
With the base character finally looking perfect, we were able to jump back in and do what we like best: drawing the hair and outfits!
All's well that ends well! It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride, but we are so happy with the final result! We wouldn’t choose it any other way!
How will they work in game?
We will of course be using the same color swap system as our furniture items. This means HSL sliders and color swatches! (Freedom!)
And ofcourse you can also swap out character specific colors like skin color, eye color and hair color.
What’s next?
We have already asked Kaitsu to draw the first walking animation, so those will be starting to come in very soon.
Our own focus will be on implementing the new visuals of the characters into the game. And that’s going to be quite an ordeal as well I think. You see, we have to make sure the characters can correctly interact with the furniture items. There will be a lot of masking involved (can’t have them lying on top of the duvet, now can we?). No big deal you think? Correct! Except we are always keeping an eye out for performance. And let’s just say Unity’s built-in options aren’t quite the most performant option in our case.
But once that’s finished it’ll be such an improvement over the characters currently just staring at the stove until food pops out.
Got to think about developer satisfaction as well, right? - The developer
Until next month!
Cheers,
Flimango 🦩