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[ZeroTec]

Your latest post about the rope-system is super interesting and insightful . Cool to see how you structure and build the environments.

This game really looks and feels very different from everything else. Looking forward to play it from start to finish

[dukope]

Thanks again everyone for the encouragement. Right, then.. character tools.

Character Tools

From the start of this project I knew creating all the sailors was gonna be a huge task. I looked around at various "create a character" libraries and wasn't impressed so I decided I'd just try to make them all myself. For the dev build I settled on a pretty basic system of blend targets applied to a common base character, with animated weighting to switch between them. That worked ok for a few characters in a few scenes but I could see pretty quickly that it wouldn't scale up to 80 characters in >20 scenes.

It took me a while, with lots of trial and error, and now I've finally got the character pipeline sorted. My goal was to be able to quickly create characters as both original builds and as components of existing pieces. I also wanted to keep things fairly flexible so I could build characters piecemeal - going back to edit or adjust them whenever I felt like. The current result is a set of tools: ObraHumans, ObraPainter, ObraSculptor (all Maya MEL-scripts), and ComposeHuman (Haxe command-line app).


ObraHumans

This the main tool for creating and editing characters in Maya. There's no special meaning for "human" here, I just went through most of the obvious names with previous tools (character, crew, sailor, etc) and wanted something new.

Flipping between characters in the ObraHumans tool

For this game I've modeled and rigged only a single base "neutral" character - unique characters are created as variations of this. Each unique character is made up of:

• The neutral base body mesh (rigged)
• Blend targets on the body for changing features (always 100%, non-animated: face shape, injuries, expressions, etc)
• Separate hair/clothing/hat/etc meshes (optional)
• An overall scale (applied to the rig, so elongating limbs instead of a raw scale factor)

Switching between characters is a process of applying blend targets, showing/hiding different piece meshes, and setting a rig scale. The script handles this for me and I can easily add variations, new clothes, hats, etc, then choose them from the drop-downs for any character. It works a lot like a typical character builder, just integrated into Maya and organized for easy additions.

Adjusting pieces/targets/clothes on one character

ComposeHuman

ComposeHuman is a command-line tool for compositing the texture layers. The compositing logic is based on the stuff I wrote about earlier, encoding a sort of alpha value into RGB-painted textures. I originally had a fairly complicated process here but moving that complexity to the ObraHumans script let me simplify ComposeHuman a lot.

ObraHumans calls out to ComposeHuman whenever adding or removing a piece to a character. That updates the texture and it's reloaded into Maya. In the end, each character has two unique textures (body and clothes) that are composited based on the selected pieces. Most pieces just use the body texture but some clothes actually have to overlay the body and need the separate texture for that.

ComposeHuman has just two modes: "build" or "paint". Build does a simple composite:

Code:

> ComposeHuman build seaman2 base-male face-seaman2 pants-long

Compositing layers into a single texture

Paint mode also composites but tints the base layers so they can later be separated. This is the texture that I paint on directly using ObraPainter (explained below).

Code:

> ComposeHuman paint face-seaman2 <workingDir> base-male

Paint-ready texture with ignored pixels in blue/cyan

ObraPainter

ObraPainter is the MEL-based painting script. Maya's built-in 3dpaint tool is so limited and buggy that I needed to add a bunch of workarounds and features to get a smooth pipeline. ComposeHuman was a big part of that (all the alpha-in-RGB and compositing stuff) but I also had to add a custom file-based undo/redo system since Maya's was so flaky. And the ObraPainter window includes the most useful shortcuts for brush colors, alpha values, showing wireframes, toggling reflection, etc.

All the actual painting is done in Maya by hand on a Bamboo tablet. For non-stroke stuff I can also quickly edit the texture in Photoshop - to shift some pixels around or whatever.

Painting a character

ObraSculptor

The last character tool is a simple mode-switching helper. Since all of the character variations are defined as blend targets for the base body mesh, I needed an easy way to edit these. You don't want to edit the base mesh directly, and you don't want all your blend targets hanging around visible in your scene most of the time. That's what I had while making the dev build and it was getting way out of control. So ObraSculptor just unhides the desired mesh and sets it up for vertex editing.

Sculpting a character's blend target

In Use

With all this character tool work mostly solved I've been able to start proper arting on the sailors. It's a huge relief that the pipeline actually works ok. Everything is fast enough that I can make around 2 characters per day, which puts me on track to finish all of them in a month or two.

Right now they all look sorta samey, especially in-game with 1-bit rendering. I'm not too worried about that as most people do like kinda similar anyways. Still, identifying sailors by appearance is important in this game so hopefully after adding clothing variations, tattoos, and other custom stuff they'll differentiate more.

Here's a few faces I've done so far:

[tupikp (Studio5113)]

I'm amazed on how you create your game. I read your Paper, Please devlog and as the result I ended up learning Haxe, OpenFL and HaxeFlixel. I hope this time I could get the same effect with Unity 5.

Thanks a lot Mr Pope!

[santaragione]

Impressive work Lucas, especially on the ship imho, after all the "ropes work" it looks so consistent...awesome!

[ReverendTed]

Great entries.  More awesome tools.
Do you feel pretty confident that most of the tools (and scripts?) you've written so far have (or will) save you time and hassle in the long run?
Are you thinking through the plot and puzzle flow throughout the process?  Have you come across anything that's caused you to reconsider the scope of the game?

[s0]

hi i don't have have anything to say other than this game looks great

posting to follow

[dukope]

Do you feel pretty confident that most of the tools (and scripts?) you've written so far have (or will) save you time and hassle in the long run?

Well, I hope it'll save me time in the end. It's really distracting for me to work with inefficient tools so I'm always tempted to smooth out any rough edges. I guess that motivates me more than something concrete like saving X hours or whatnot. I try to be a little careful though. One reason why I avoided Blender for this project is that I could get seriously sidetracked making source-level changes there.

Are you thinking through the plot and puzzle flow throughout the process?  Have you come across anything that's caused you to reconsider the scope of the game?

Yeah, I'm always rolling the plot/characters/flashbacks/fates around in my head. The only big semi-recent change is that I'll probably limit the number of flashbacks to ~20. I was originally thinking around 60 but that's both too much work for me and too open of a playing field to sort through for the player. So there'll be a fair few characters that either survive, die "off camera", or die simultaneously.

[gimymblert]

hi i don't have have anything to say other than this game looks great

posting to follow

[oldblood]

These tools are amazing. You make me feel like I don't push myself nearly hard enough with my own games when I see you putting this much detail and attention into your work. Inspiring and soul-shattering all at the same time.

[pottering]

More and more amazing!

The only thing that I did not find cool amazeballs is in a previous post it seems that you used the 8-head proportion for the characters.
The 8-head is an heroic, super-hero proportion, if you are still changing things regarding character models I would suggest playing with 6, 7 head proportion, just to see how it looks.
But then I am not a 3D artist, and it is not a big deal either.

[dukope]

These tools are amazing. You make me feel like I don't push myself nearly hard enough with my own games when I see you putting this much detail and attention into your work. Inspiring and soul-shattering all at the same time.

Thanks! Don't sell yourself short though. I just played your Masochisia alpha and it's great.

The only thing that I did not find cool amazeballs is in a previous post it seems that you used the 8-head proportion for the characters.
The 8-head is an heroic, super-hero proportion, if you are still changing things regarding character models I would suggest playing with 6, 7 head proportion, just to see how it looks.
But then I am not a 3D artist, and it is not a big deal either.

This is good feedback. I'm not a fan of hero proportions either and I chose an "average male" reference of 7.5 heads for this game. That seems pretty normal after a quick google check.

Something I have found though is that due to the first person view/perspective, the character's proportions feel more top-heavy in-game. Changing it to 6 or even 7 heads might push things a little too cartoony so I'll probably just leave it where it is. I will keep this in mind though, thanks.

[oldblood]

Thanks! Don't sell yourself short though. I just played your Masochisia alpha and it's great.

Coming from you, that's a huge compliment and very unexpected. Really appreciate the encouragement!

[oahda]

Thanks for all the technical stuff. This is what I love about devlogs so shame on me for not usually really putting any work into describing my own underlying work in fear of scaring away those who are not interested. How alone am I in enjoying this sort of stuff? What about the rest of you?

Anyway, I love it, so please keep posting this stuff. c;

[ReverendTed]

How alone am I in enjoying this sort of stuff? What about the rest of you?

I'm not a developer, but I find this type of thing fascinating.  I've also really enjoyed the Double Fine Kickstarter Adventure "behind the scenes" documentary and updates, and I ravenously consume in-game dev commentary.

[Malekh]

Did you find a solution to the magically open doors?

You could do something such as when the flashback ends, the player is in the position where he was in the flashback. That way he can be behind doors that were closed, and can undo a latch or just open them from the inside.

[ReverendTed]

You could do something such as when the flashback ends, the player is in the position where he was in the flashback. That way he can be behind doors that were closed, and can undo a latch or just open them from the inside.

The first time I played the demo, that's exactly what I was thinking as the flashback began to fade out: "Oh, nuts, I shouldn't have walked back outside, because I could be behind the locked door!"

[TheWing]

Thanks for all the technical stuff. This is what I love about devlogs so shame on me for not usually really putting any work into describing my own underlying work in fear of scaring away those who are not interested. How alone am I in enjoying this sort of stuff? What about the rest of you?

Anyway, I love it, so please keep posting this stuff. c;

I wonder how seemingly everyone has the feeling that "argh writing technobabble will scare people away!!".. It seriously won't :D
Just write the posts as you feel the best (and if you get feedback, adjust to that, of course), but don't limit stuff because you think something!

So, yeah, in depth dev-stuff is great in devlogs. I find it way more interesting to know how a game works and how the developer has been making it through the time, way more than just a post like "this week we got water working *pic* yay!".

This devlog is probably best just due to the fact it describes stuff in great detail, talks about tools and kinks and other things that have been discovered during development. Keep it up!

[tupikp (Studio5113)]

Thanks for all the technical stuff. This is what I love about devlogs so shame on me for not usually really putting any work into describing my own underlying work in fear of scaring away those who are not interested. How alone am I in enjoying this sort of stuff? What about the rest of you?

Anyway, I love it, so please keep posting this stuff. c;

You're not alone! I believe most of this forum members are enjoying a deep behind the scene stuff. I love "behind the scenes" story of almost anything. I could learn a lot from it.

[vividhelix]

Thanks for all the technical stuff. This is what I love about devlogs so shame on me for not usually really putting any work into describing my own underlying work in fear of scaring away those who are not interested. How alone am I in enjoying this sort of stuff? What about the rest of you?

Anyway, I love it, so please keep posting this stuff. c;

You're not alone! I believe most of this forum members are enjoying a deep behind the scene stuff. I love "behind the scenes" story of almost anything. I could learn a lot from it.

Seconded (thirded?).

I deeply enjoy the "how it's made" aspect, especially considering there are so many ways to skin a cat. I'm also very interested in the game design decisions, stuff you never think about while playing the game.

[dukope]

Did you find a solution to the magically open doors?
You could do something such as when the flashback ends, the player is in the position where he was in the flashback. That way he can be behind doors that were closed, and can undo a latch or just open them from the inside.

I don't have a good solution for this yet. Restoring the player's last flashback position is potentially way more complicated than it looks in the dev build. The configuration of the ship (cargo, crew, broken stuff) will change a lot more between flashbacks so some places you could stand in a flashback won't translate to the current time.

More than that though, I kinda like the idea that viewing a flashback is completely passive and you're always reset afterwards. I'd really like a better mechanic than "magically opening doors" but part of the problem is that I only plan on having 3 locked door gates in the whole game. So either I integrate a proper mechanic and use it a lot more or I punt on the whole thing and just swing the doors open when needed.