Back in July of 2022, we decided that we wanted to take a gnome mystery game idea we were toying with and turn it into a 3D Horror Collectathon.
With what little free time we have to work on the game, we decided we needed to focus our efforts on the most important aspect of any collectathon game: movement. For the first couple of months, we worked only on character animations and movement mechanics. We are trying to polish up the basic movements (running, jumping, rolling, etc.) as much as we can before moving on to level building and more advanced movement.
This was the first iteration of our character. We made a simple, low-poly character that we were able to quickly animate and drop into rough test levels.
We would create animations, test out the character in the level, write down what movements we thought were missing, then made more animations for the designer to work with.
The initial tests helped us learn that animation is - as expected - a very important part of making movement smooth and fun. The first character model proved to be a bit too stiff to animate, so we decided to make a higher poly model to help the animations read a bit better. Below are a few of our favorites from the newest model. We will post more in the gallery we're going to set up for all of the art and footage for the game.
As we stated before, we have little free time to work on this, but we are working on it whenever we can. We're reaching the point where we can start modeling environment assets and building test levels that look closer to our vision (a horror filled hellscape).