 What's up everybody I'm the man goose and welcome back to another edition of what I'm going to be calling the third point of view since there's three of us We're talking about third person games Today we're going to be talking about character creation and I have two gentlemen joining me from project stamina and Undying games now. You probably recognize mr. Fancy pants by now. You probably started thinking he's going to be my co-host No, it just keeps aligning up where he's uh, he's kind of the uh the guy I needed so Mr. Fancy pants go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself Hi for people who are seeing me for the first time I am the producer of project stamina a third person action MOBA and in the realm of character creation. I do high-level design philosophy and Guidance along the character production pipeline for both game design and art design Awesome awesome and joining us from undying games is Simon. How you doing, man? I'm doing well. Thanks I'm Simon. I'm the lead character artist of the games. Basically I'm in charge of all the leading of the 3d art department and Also collaborating with uh concept art design from characters and level design Right on and Simon was kind enough to provide us with some new turntables of the ethereal characters So uh, if you're if you've been hankering for some new ethereal content, um, this is just you know Uh a different perspective of the characters you've already seen but it is some new stuff So thank you Simon for that and I also again want to thank failco punch for allowing me to use some of her Um gigantic gigantic clips from her youtube channel and go go go check her check her out You know help me thank her. You know go drop her a sub. It's free. It's and it'll make me happy. So Yeah, let's uh, let's dive into the topic now. So What I wanted to start with is the the beginning. Uh, where do you start creating a character at? You know, what's the catalyst that that begins the character's creation? You know, is it is it Something that's needed for the game. Is it a cool art concept? Is it just a cool concept that one of the game designers have? You know, that's kind of what I'm trying to trying to find out So uh, Simon, why don't you get us started out? How do you what do you guys start out over at undyne games? um, so we usually start um with the lord apartment ideas And at the same time we try to fill the next um role to work with I mean, uh, once we have one character Done for each role. Um, we start over again with the next stage of characters Once is finished the initial idea like, um, we need a sky slayer that Looks like flames, but we want it to be a creature And that it doesn't have any weapon Okay, we start concepting join some thumbnails and sketches The low souls Bring that idea that give The aesthetics what we want Making sure that the character has a strong um, lecturability and clearly communicates what it does Basically is The workflow that that we follow Nice, I like that. It's very lore driven as I am a huge lore head and I believe fancy is too speaking of fancy Oh, yeah How do you guys do it over over a project stamina? so we take, um In some ways the opposite approach the the end result of a character whose Look is very clearly readable in game and their design Reflects their gameplay is definitely the ultimate goal Like if your tanks don't look tanky and your dps characters don't look dangerous then you're doing something wrong um But we start with the mechanics That we want to see so say we want an assassin We look at good assassin mechanics and lay out a kit based entirely on its function And then when that starts getting tuned into place and we like how a set of abilities Start playing together. We look for Artistic ways to express that that tie in together with each other and I think that they're both really Uh, very valid processes. Our first character r4 was actually designed Uh, the way that you guys do it Which was we took this really awesome looking character and went okay Let's build some abilities that fit with the role that he looks like he plays which is kind of a tanky bruiser So We we do a little bit of both but what we've been focusing on is starting with the mechanics and then building toward an aesthetic end And I assume it's probably the same for for both of you guys. It's uh, it probably varies by character to character But it's kind of looking for the the the main process. But yeah, it's probably different things that each time, huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it totally depends Yeah, it really helps to be able to Attack the problem from a bunch of different directions Because then as soon as you hit a roadblock on one path You have another path that you can take to get the rest of the way there That helps you clear out what you're struggling with on the other side Like they're the the more different directions you can take in doing character design I think the more robust your design process is going to be and the better all of your characters are going to look at the end Right on So uh, moving on so what are the The steps involved in creating the character and how do you keep them balanced? Like i'm sure that you have a great idea for this awesome ability But you know, somebody else might have to step in and say, okay You know, maybe having this person invulnerable and dealing Thousands of damage on one ability probably isn't the smartest thing, you know in game result So um, so what can how do you guys manage that? fancy go ahead so A big part of that comes down to testing um Something can look good on paper, but you put it in game and it combines with something else You hadn't thought about when you were just looking at the kit and whoops, it's broken. So a lot of it is Building a system that allows you to rapidly change your balance your numbers and your mechanics But from the outset the closer you are to a balanced character the easiest the easier it is to get there And for that we focus on a philosophy of making sure that no character can do everything We focus just as hard on the character's strengths as we do on their weaknesses Because if you have a character that doesn't have any weaknesses You have a character that's too good to put in the game And if you have a character that doesn't have any strengths Then you have a character that nobody's going to play so Making sure that we focus on both of those equally is how we create like Dynamic and balanced characters in a diverse case. You want people to feel powerful playing that character without actually being overpowered Yeah, and we want to we want people to feel like Playing around the character's weaknesses are just as important as playing to the character's strengths whether that's by like carefully positioning themselves by Neating with offset their weaknesses. It's all part of the same puzzle. Okay. We'll show you there for a second But I think I think we've got the gist of it Simon, what are some of the steps you guys take and how do you guys keep everything balanced over there and I'm dying? um first of all the the department the gta department Think of what meet what meet we we like to to make um making sure that That concept that initial idea represent What we need that that meet uh cover ups Then we jump to come to do comparations to other meets. Um, if we have used the That specific ability before uh, if that ability have cc Why that ability should have cc? But and the meet has to go hand in hand With what its abilities are and what can people expect by just looking at at the character Um, once once the gta department has that final draft Um, they began to specifically specify numbers on just paper and then the programming team can Apply that on the a balancing cards For tweaking it basically Is it is it kind of frustrating like when you Rig up and animate for an ability and then it winds up that ability just isn't going to work And they need something new is it frustrating that you have to redo that? Or is that just kind of expected and part of the process? It's it's just like uh part of the process. Uh, we we always do a lot of refinement, uh, on the nice steps uh to make sure uh We end up with what the gta department describes at the initial stage And have you guys run into that problem fancy over at our project stamina? Like haven't like an ability just didn't work in game. So you had to go back to the We haven't done anything that is So mechanically out there that we don't think it can be tuned by numbers yet part of part of our process to avoid The loss of the loss of development time and resources into an ability Especially an animation, which is one of the most work intensive parts of character design Having to throw work away one of the things we do to avoid that is we Once we have a kit that we like we split our character development paths. So that concept art is working on the character design simultaneous to development implementing the kit So we actually run our character designs out on placeholder models, which you can see in Your video One of our characters is not yet rigged and animated But we've got their abilities functioning on a play test on a placeholder model in the game So we get We get kind of an early canary in the coal mine to see whether or not an ability feels good and it's going to work Before we spend a bunch of resources bringing it to life on the finished rig and model, right? And you mentioned that the rigging in animations is kind of the more the more work intensive things Simon, what do you what what do you believe is the the hardest part of creating a new character? I think that along with animation and rigging the process is the concept process we we did a lot of iterations concepting wanting to search for the right The right shapes the right looking for a character that clearly In communicates what we want to this myth this specific myth to be We also concept all the The abilities to make sure that the department of technical art and the sound designer works close with concept and The end result is what we want at the starting point but Now all the times works. Yeah Well, speaking of end result Well, like when do you guys when when you guys say, okay, this character is ready? Let's let's they're they're alpha ready. They're ready to be tested by by people in a gameplay environment Well, like when do you when do you make that determination fancy? So early early, especially alpha testing is really just about making sure it feels good And isn't really horribly mechanically broken so For us as soon as the character because we're in alpha Well, we're because we're pre alpha still as soon as the character's kit is Operational even on a placeholder model We're ready to throw it in and get it testing and people will come back with this number is way too high This number is way too low. It didn't feel like I did anything when I pressed my speed boost Maybe it needs to go faster And the way that our engine is set up is those are all very very very fast changes. So it's easier to get something operational at all into the system and getting tested Than it is to try and tune the numbers on the back end without throwing it at a bunch of testers Because the more eyes you have on something the better perspective you're going to get That that that process will definitely change when we introduce Ranked games later down the road Like you need to put way more polish and fine-tuning on a character before you introduce them to a ranked or a competitive environment But for early testing Pretty much as soon as the abilities work. I want people's opinion on it Right on Simon same same same question like when you guys decide that uh that a character they're they're ready. They're kind of done sort of As we need that every character has a nice game flow I mean if it needs an specific feedback bfx Or if it needs that that specific animation works clearly what we took it later Uh That aspect should be uh, check it once we are totally happy with how it looks Um, and how it behaves in the game Maybe if the character needs a little bit of love from some specific department And once we end that stage of refinement, uh, we can start testing trying to break its abilities with another character and so And then if all the elites have green light for the character we can call it finish it right on So i'm gonna Bring up something. I wouldn't really plan it on but I thought of it as we were talking here Both ethereal and project stamina have gone about community inclusion in different ways ethereal that you you guys completely redesigned the look the appearance of the of the map and the and the In the heroes and everything based on the feedback you got from that initial Like here's what our game's going to be and everybody's like, yeah, that's a little too cartoony Then you guys stepped it up and turned the the models into more kind of a final fantasy inspired models So that was really good to see you guys taking that input from the community and then for project stamina Mr. Fancy pants, you guys have your um your cake Uh character, uh, you want you want to talk about cake for a little bit? okay, so Cake was it's it's a community designed character that We kicked off when we hit our second Patreon fundraising goal and the way that this works is our entire is I write I write these articles every week Highlighting a very very specific granular aspect of character design, you know, what what's their role? What are their functions going to be in the game? What is their big weakness that they can't? That they need uh an ally to shore up for them because they don't have it on their own um And I outline how though how that piece of design Is interacts with the project stamina environment? and then the the patreon community votes on What options like what directions to take that specific piece of design and over the last year? we've been building a character that is Very very close to complete uh this this next week. We will be Finalizing their last ability all of the abilities were designed by community members to fit this predetermined set of design goals that we Chose that they all chose together And it's turning into a really cool looking character It's not something that I would have come up with on my own, but I'm getting really excited to play it Right on that's awesome And then uh, Simon, how do you feel about the changes you guys have made to to ethereal? Do you do you like the um the new art direction that you guys went with since back in was it like november of 2018 I think yeah, um I think that the the new erection um has more power of erection because all the community was so hybrid but with the the um the looking of paragon and we need to um Get to the community that the same hype with our graphics, right? Um so that direction, um allow us to Start uh experimenting with some different workflows And get the forget the results that we are um looking for in in these nice stages um, we start, um involving with uh, some company of 3d scan Faces for our characters um Since um axial we are doing this with with our characters Working with some nice um 3d is 3d scans for faces and Body parts that allow us uh to bring that character um more realistic look And also for the environment Our labor designers are Working so hard to match these uh new Realistic um like final fantasies and stuff um And yeah, it's working so well Right on I just want to let it to be known too that axial's body scans were taken from my body So if I were to take my shirt off, I would look exactly like axial so That's true story True story, not that true Uh, is there anything else you guys wanted to bring up about character creation at all? No I I just think it's like one of the coolest unique pieces of The game design puzzle and it's really for people that don't That haven't had the privilege of working on a game with a studio in their lives like A lot of people think Oh, you just come up with this cool idea for a character and then you hand it to the people who bring it to life But it's a way more involved process than that There are so many like tiny details that Like you probably think you thought of when you first come up with a character design, but when you get into concept art like you said or when a concept art gets handed off into 3d modeling And then modeling gets handed to animation where it has to get tied back to the execution of the abilities in the game system There's so many minute details that have Really significant impact all along the all along the pipeline um That are that are just fascinating Like oh you've got a character with a cape that's super cool turns out from a lot of camera angles the cape blocks the Characters view like the player's view of what the character is doing and their silhouette becomes ambiguous and hard to read This cape was a really awesome looking idea This is actually something we're gonna have to go back and fix with one of our characters Because we threw a badass looking cape on them and then in animation we realized that we weren't getting the We wanted a hundred percent of the time We're gonna have to go back make some moderate aesthetic changes to the model And that kind of oh, I didn't think of that Never stops appearing no matter how many games you work on no matter how many characters you design You'll always find something new that you didn't know So it's a way more involved process than just make a kit And we learned from the Incredibles no capes So I think that's going to about wrap it up Um, I'll just give you guys an opportunity to to plug your game and and talk to the fans a little bit Say whatever you you'll want or uh, you know, if you have a personal twitch or youtube or anything like that You want to plug go go for it as well? Simon you got anything Um, yeah, we we expect that in the next months that you all can uh See well what we are been working on that the the past years and it's amazing with How all is coming up together um Making some stuff that the community likes and it really helps that um, you guys can enjoy that as We enjoyed it to making Right on you you guys hear that yeah within the month that's that that makes me very excited Um, mr. Fates fans anything So if you haven't signed up for our mailing list already It's at project stamina dot com the scroll to the bottom of the page when information for our alpha Is ready to roll out it will go out over that channel So sign up for the mailing list Check your inboxes occasionally if you don't have notifications on your phone And if you're coming to pax east Let us know We are going to be there and we want to see you Right hold on i might possibly join you i'm still figuring out the the logistics of that But i think that's real yeah hell yeah That's gonna wrap it up for this episode i appreciate you guys coming out simon fancy great guests great conversation Really enjoyed it, but for now this is the man goose signing off you guys have a good one A man goose