 Welcome back fellow horror lovers. Have you ever dreamt of creating your own retro style characters? Or wondered what the polygon counts of your favourite PlayStation 1 characters were? Well then, this video might be right up your alley. Today, we're delving back into the eerie world of my PlayStation 1-inspired horror game. I am thrilled to be able to introduce you to Liam, the protagonist and player character of my game. Join me as I continue my game development journey from unlocking the secrets of designing and creating an authentic PS1 character to making the character playable in Unreal Engine 5. So, what exactly makes a PS1 character? To find the answer, I began by researching characters from the PS1 era. I wanted to get a good feel for the aesthetics as well as the technical constraints involved with creating 3D characters in the 90s. I noticed from mood boards I created that even though the characters tended to be very blocky and lacking in detail, the characters that we saw on screen actually represented much more detailed designs in the eyes of the character artists that created them, and this can be seen in the much more detailed concept art. I looked at the polygon counts for the same characters and found that the sweet spot for PS1 games seemed to be between 500 and 700 triangles. I also found that a lot of the characters featured limbs that were broken into parts to remove the need for skinning and to keep the triangle count low. Armed with this knowledge, I set about designing my own character. I already had a good idea of who he was and how he looked, so I created some concept art as a starting point before I even considered any 3D modelling. I wanted to make sure that there was a better, more detailed character design behind the low poly, low resolution one that we'll feature in the game, in the same way as with the original PS1 characters that I'd looked at. Once it was time to move on to the modelling, I made the decision to get a ready-made base mesh for a low poly character to get me started. I could have created this myself, but I wouldn't have been able to create anything better than this mesh by Decodigo, and the triangle count of 508 also fits perfectly with the technical constraints of the PlayStation 1, so I downloaded the mesh and imported it into Maya to work on it. The first thing I noticed is that Maya read the triangle count as 964, and I have no idea why that differs from the count on Sketchfab. If anyone knows why this is, please let me know in the comments. Anyway, I spent a little time adjusting the character mesh to match the character concept I created. I reshaped the head a little and then spent some time creating the mesh for the hair. I added some extra geometry for the turn-ups on his sleeves and also for the collar on his shirt. Once I felt happy with the mesh, I UV mapped everything, but instead of keeping the textual density consistent, I made the UV shell for the face bigger than everything else, so that I'd have more texture resolution to work with there. Next, I used Substance 3D Painter to create most of the textures. I just used the default skin, funnel and denim materials. I decided to keep the red and black colour for the shirt, as I really liked the way it looks, and I chose to leave out some details such as buttons on the shirt and pockets on the jeans, as I don't think they were needed, but I might add them later if I changed my mind. I couldn't get the face looking right in Substance 3D Painter, so I exported the texture into Photoshop and added the eyes, nose, ears and other details in there. And although it looks like nightmare fuel in this form, it does look pretty good once it's applied back onto the model. I also made the eyes larger than they would ordinarily be, as this seems to be a convention of PS1 characters, and it makes the face easier to read at lower resolutions. Next, I reduced the texture resolution to 256x256 and reduced the number of colours in the texture and then put the model into the game so I could see how it looked when viewed through the post-process effects and the lowered resolution. I was really happy with the result, which meant I could then turn my attention to the rigging and animation. It was all ready to rig the character manually, but then I remembered that last year, one of my students used the auto-rigging on Mixamo for their character, and the results were really good, so I decided to take a punt and give this a try with Liam. To my surprise, the process was really quick and easy. I just uploaded the character, told Mixamo where the chin, wrists, elbows, knees and wiggy were, and then I could also choose how complex I wanted the rig to be. Again, I was surprised that I could choose a rig that had bones for reduced joints in the hands with the thumb, index finger and then the rest of the fingers all combined together, which is exactly how Liam's mesh is built. So I chose that option and then let the auto-rigger work its magic. After only a few seconds, Liam was rigged and I was able to download the character rig in a T-pose and then find and download some animations for him. I chose an idle, walk and run, as these are all he needs right now. I'll add more throughout development if and when the need arises. Now that I had everything I needed, the final step was to get Liam set up in Unreal Engine 5. I brought in his character mesh, texture and animations. I then checked everything looked as I expected it to and then set about creating the character blueprint. I did this by duplicating the default third-person character blueprint and substituting the Quinn character with Liam. I did also test it at this point, which gives some pretty amusing results. So next I set up the animation blueprint which handles which animations should play depending on what Liam is doing. I made one final change which was to make Liam move at a walk by default and to only run when a button is pressed, as I think this will work better in the game where he'll be spending a lot of time in claustrophobic feeling spooky houses so he'll probably spend more time walking than running, just like in Resident Evil. He's currently set up for dual analog movement or mouse and keyboard movement but I am considering giving him tank movement controls to make the game feel more authentic to the PS1 era. Let me know in the comments if you think I should keep the more modern control scheme or if I should implement tank controls. And that is everything I did to create the first character for my PlayStation 1 style horror game. I'm having a lot of fun with this project and I'm also really enjoying sharing my game development journey with the devlog videos. If you're also enjoying the devlog videos then make sure you let me know by hitting the like button and by telling me if there's anything else you'd like to see me document in a devlog by leaving a comment below the video. If you'd like to support my work here at Game Dev Academy, which includes creating detailed game development tutorials as well as the devlog series then please check out my Patreon, the link is in the video description. I've been Shane for Game Dev Academy, thanks so much for watching and I hope I'll see you again for devlog number 4.