For the art team, this part of development was focused on testing, testing, and testing. We had created silhouettes and options last time, and for the longest time it felt that all we were doing were creating more options. This week, we were determined to finally stop keeping doors open, and finalized our design!
Testing with various options
To decide on how our blob should look like, we decided to test different aspects of it: shape, consistency, elasticity, augments, and face style. We had a general direction we wanted to go in, but we thought that if we knew which specific aspects people liked most and combined them, we could come up with a better design.
Here are the results! (insert drumroll)
We found that the testers liked the characteristics that implied more personality and movement.
Putting it together (and personifying concepts)
After seeing the results, I mixed-and-matched the shortlist of characteristics into 5-6 designs. At first I labelled them from A-F, but I felt I was being too rigid. For this phase, I wanted the team to look at each blob like it was a friend or a pet, and see which one they felt the ‘closest’ to.
The answer? To name each of them! They aren’t very creative names, but naming them gave my teammates a better sense of what the blob designs would be if it was a pet.
How do we animate 3D jelly smoothly?
When we first started thinking of how the blob would look and act in-game, the very first thought was, “How do we animate jelly?”
We considered several options:
Making the blob and rigging multiple spheres in Maya, while using a jelly shader we found on the Unity asset store.
Using soft-body physics in Unity.
Using Raymarching Toolkit with non-meshes that we had to animate in Unity itself.
We decided to go with the last option, especially because Raymarching makes the intersection between two meshes a lot smoother:
The interesting part about Raymarching is that all of this is done with math. In this scene, there aren’t any actual meshes being made, but they’re all calculated. This looks good so far optimization-wise, because too many meshes/polys can really add lag. However, we’ll have to see how the game will hold up with a lot of these blobs flying around.
Since I knew I wanted this blob to have a ‘tail,’ I quickly put together a test and tried to make the blob’s tail lag behind its body. By using Unity’s spring joint to connect the body and tail and messing with how much it bounces, I was able to get a better idea of how blob movement might look like:
So far, I’m liking the middle sample, which is a middle-ground between solid and super-jelly. However, I want to look into seeing its readability in-game — maybe I’ll consider using the last one since it’s the most readable.
Going forward…
After deciding on the consistency and springiness we want for the blob, I want to test out basic animations with the blob’s arms. Since it doesn’t have segments in its tiny limbs (i.e. no elbows), I want to see the extent of its expressiveness. From this test, I will either have to make slight changes to the design — or look for a way to subtly add elbows without the blob looking really strange.
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