Hey everyone, it’s time for another update!
We just got back from PAX West last week where we were publicly showing off Wytchwood for the first time at the Indie Minibooth!
Lots of people got a chance to play the demo and general reception was great. The game really clicked with folks, who all said they couldn’t wait to play more. As a team, this is very motivational to hear and makes us all want to keep moving forward.
But for those of you who weren’t at PAX and didn’t get to play this early demo first hand, here’s a little snippet of what was on the showfloor.
Welcome back to our monthly update! This time we’ll be taking a look at what goes into making character art for Wytchwood!
All characters in Wytchwood start out as a set of sketches to try and nail down the shape and feel of what they need to do. Some characters need to be able to move around, and some just need to stand and look pretty. The sketching phase is where we’ll break down all the different parts of a character and how their puppet can be made.
We then create the art for the character, and break up all the moving parts into separate pieces for a animated puppet. The number and complexity of parts varies wildly from character to character; do their legs need to be able to jump? Do they move their mouth? Are they doing a specific action, like digging a field or knocking on a door?
To make the puppet, we assemble all the parts in Spine, a skeletal animation program. From here, we can create all the needed animations and effects for the character. Once it’s ready, it can be imported into the game for testing! It usually takes a few revisions to make sure everything is working properly.
Some character, like the players Witch, are more complex. She currently requires 6 different puppets (one for each direction), each with their own animation set. Because she’s the central character of the game, we needed to put a lot more attention to detail into her art.
Other characters, like these villagers, also need to be multiple characters. Each one has a different skin we can run on the same animation puppet so we can easily create a wide visual variety without needing too many extra resources.
Narrative characters are the unique and memorable story players that fill out the fairytales on Wytchwood. Most of their interaction comes through the game’s dialogue and magic systems, but they visually change a lot depending on what their role in the story is. Usually narrative characters will need multiple puppets as their story progresses and their actions change.
Hello there! In this update we'll show some of the behind the scenes tools we've made for designing Wytchwood.
Here's a typical scene in Wytchwood with how it looks when working in Unity.
We've set it up so that our game camera can follow our editor camera around. This helps immensely with setting the visual style of Wytchwood. This way, we use a typical workflow within our engine while getting a very good idea of how placing objects is going to look in the end.
The ground in Wytchwood always looks really detailed. We achieve this by using a tool to "paint" many objects on the ground. The problem is when there are so many objects close together videogame cameras can have a hard time determining which object is "closer." The result of that is one object could be rendered in front of another object when it should be rendered behind.
This is handled with a special camera that renders the ground first,
then the regular camera renders the rest of the scene on top of it.
The blue blob on the ground is the AI NavMesh. We use this to determine if part of the world is accessible by the player and NPCs. In a typical 3D game, a NavMesh might be generated based on placement of floors, ladders, stairs and obstacles. In Wytchwood, it made sense to be able to author it by hand.
This takes a bit of upfront effort but is easy to maintain and really fast to iterate on. It also allows us to specifically define where we want the player to be able to go. Consider the following:
This is an eagle eye view of a scene in Wytchwood. You might see that the navmesh doesn't stretch down all the way to the base of those rock pillars. That’s because they might get in the way of the player being able to see where they’re going.
The NavMesh also comes into play when we want to make sure that The Witch is always able to find goodies.
And this breezy foliage here I feel is pretty sharp.
We put a lot of effort in taking our beautiful art assets and turning it into a lush world full of breath and life. Thanks for tuning in!
Liam
Wytchwood June Dev Update
Hey everyone! Our team is waist deep in Wytchwood development and we’ve been hard at work on full production over the last several months. But it’s healthy to come up for air once and while, so we’d like to share with you guys what we’ve making on a more regular basis.
Every month, we’ll be giving updates on the progress of the game with new screenshots, gifs, and highlights from the team.
Wytchwood is a narrative adventure game set in a world of fables and fairy tales, so you’ll be interacting with a lot of folks. Through this dialogue system complete with awesome portrait art, you’ll be able to converse, curse, or cure the characters you meet.
There’s also plenty of citters and beasties that inhabit the forests, and you’ll have to use some ingenuity to best them.
In this sequence, the witch needs to get some dog hair to make a spell, but the dog is more than a match for her old bones.
Dogs will eat meat though, so maybe she can trick it into eating some bait infused with a sleeping potion!
