One thing I have been thinking about recently, is the direction in which the indie game scene seems to be heading. This is something that can be seen in upcoming of games, various talks, articles and what is considered the largest recent successes. It is a direction that might have large consequences for the future of the medium.
Birth of a Monster part 4: It’s alive!
Before the model could be used in game, some other things was required. First the model needed to be rigged and skinned, a process where the mesh is connected to a skeleton. This skeleton then need to get animations and not until that was done where we able to get a it into the game. This job was made in part internally and partly by an external company. There were a lot of job put into this, but is unfortunately outside of the scope of the article. To some sum things up: we got the creature moving and it was now time to put inside the game.
Birth of Monster Part 3: Molding the Abomination
As a modeler the first thing I noted about this character was that the concept design demanded it to be completely unique in all of its parts. Usually it is possible to mirror some parts (e.g. an arm, a leg or some cloth piece) to save texture space and maybe some production time when modeling game characters. Not so this time.
Birth of a Monster Part 2: Conceptualizing the Horror
Thomas gave me almost full creative freedom. The basic guidelines were that it had to be a humanoid and nothing like standard zombies, “The Infected” in Penumbra: Black Plague or the creatures in Dead Space. It should also fit the the story of demon-like creatures taking over human bodies and be super creepy. Apart from that, I was free to do pretty much what I wanted.
Birth of a Monster Part 1: Creating Unspeakable Guidelines
The following article outlines the process of creating a creature model from scratch for our first person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It will go through the basic thinking that went into the design of the enemy, how the concept images where made, how the mesh was built and finally how it was put into the game
