IndieDev Prototype Week 3
Sometimes you simply gotta go hang out with the penguins.
I took a trip down to Dublin Zoo today, which I'm very fortunate to live within 40 minutes walking distance of. While by no means the biggest zoo in Europe, it's sizable enough to make a day's worth of a trip out of, and, most crucially, has a clan of Humboldt penguins that I could make notes for research.
I imagine, like a lot of people, when I think of penguins, my mind immediately conjures images of giant King Emperor colonies huddled together to stay warm in the Antarctic - sometimes with the voice of Morgan Freeman reverberating around my head, but breeds can be commonly found around the shores of South America, Africa the Galápagos Islands, and Australia & New Zealand.
It's fair to say we are not being scientifically accurate with our approach to penguin design and habits, but even spending a bit of time to watch them and ask the zookeepers (who were all very lovely) some questions helps to give a clearer idea of how to approach our story.
Also, yes, there will be a red panda in the game, b+ecause red pandas are the best.
Animals are great. We can and should do so much more to protect them. If you can donate to your local zoo or animal shelter, please do so!
Happy Feet
Our main objective for the week was locking down the visual design for the main character, Perdu. As noted, Perdu is a Penguin Chick that ends up separated from its colony. We did not use concept art to lock down the design; instead, we had separate cracks at our own interpretations, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses afterwards, but sticking within the remit of the game's overall aesthetic.
The left design followed the anatomy of an Emperor Penguin and could be considered a more realistic approach, while the right design fits more into a cartoon aesthetic with the shape and colour. The right design fits better with the overall aesthetic and shaders implemented, but was too cylindrical in shape and was suffering from 'resting bitch face'.
We had a quick look at expanding the eyes as a way to add more expressiveness, but we'll keep it to just the black dots, as we'll have bigger eyes for other adult NPCs to help differentiate between children and adults.
However, we needed to bring the hat over from the left design...
Art Update
We made some tweaks so the LOD fade is handled by scaling the meshes so there's no noise from the default LOD fade affecting the outline shader, added fog and tweaked some colour settings.
There are issues with the outline thickness currently: we want them thicker when closer to the camera and thinner at a distance, but right now they're clamped to multiples of 2 pixels, meaning when they get thicker they er... get too thick. We'll look at changing this to a single pixel or 3 pixel width and then tweak the distance settings so they get thicker more appropriately.
We also keep getting distracted from doing any work because we keep floating around taking screengrabs...