Staring is Caring?

Living Characters in Cosmonious High

We have an optimistic, organic future high school that’s good enough to eat: now it needs living, breathing characters. 

Better Shape Up!

Let’s start from the very beginning! In June 2019 we did some of our first character exploration. Early on, we wanted to use characters to develop our tech, and each alien species was designed to have a different form of locomotion: teleporting, hovercraft, two-legged, and a fan favorite–slime! 

While many slime and goo monsters are depicted as dangerous or horrific, we put all our stat points into cuteness and approachability – per our game vision.

The shape language of something slug-like and the awesome textural elements of the first goo creature really resonated with the team. We already knew we wanted some sort of underdog sports character, so we used that as the basis to explore different proportions and styles.

You can see at this stage we were noodling on all different forms of object interaction (Do aliens have hands?! Are they just sticky?), locomotion (Do they scoot? Ooze? Inch worm?), and expression (Toony mouths? Noodle lips? Beaks?). 

Once we had a foundation for all of our alien species, we did a quick silhouette check to make sure that species were immediately differentiable from each other, but also that there were enough distinct silhouettes within a species for characters to stand out.

n the end, we decided to worry more about color and accessories to differentiate within species. As you can see above, even with some rather different hairstyles, the flan had a high level of silhouette overlap. 

Then we had to worry about how to dress and accessorize characters. Style and fashion is a critical part of high school, which meant every character needed their own unique look and key items that conveyed their stereotype. 

“You should get a sense of a character’s vibe at first glance – what they’re like, what they like, how they interact with the world. I immediately want to hang out with Gleg and Jalam, and feel like I could relate to Plapew.”
– Carrie Witt, Art Director

Wait a sec, aren’t stereotypes bad???

They sure can be! Stereotypes are tools our brains use as shortcuts to fill in the blanks. If we don’t know someone, our brain takes their appearance and actions and uses them to fill in things we’ve seen or experienced before. This can lead to us misjudging, misunderstanding, and misidentifying folks. In the worst case, it contributes to things like systemic forms of oppression. 

So… why is Owlchemy leaning in to stereotypes?

Stereotypes set an expectation, and as we mentioned before, all good humor needs an expectation to work from. Once we use a stereotype to create an expectation, THEN we can work on actively subverting and undermining it, and hopefully proving long term that no matter what someone looks like or talks like, the only way to really know them is to, well, get to know them!

Our bubble-gum valley girl is actually wicked clever and brilliantly strategic. Our jock will make time for anyone and is always on your side. And our science teacher? That one you’ll have to see for yourself.

So here’s what our final lineup of Flan characters looked like: gooey fun friends each with their own personality.

Now see here!

Next, we had to bring characters to life in 3D.  Getting the form and shaders figured out was the first challenge. Turns out, one of the most vital and difficult aspects was eyes.

Early eye shader prototypes for Flan characters

As cliche as it sounds, eyes really ARE the windows to the soul, it turns out.  We needed characters to feel approachable, responsive, and emotive, and the biggest part of that was getting eye behaviour right.

The bottommost layer was simple ambiance: blinking and saccades (those itty bitty movements your eyeballs are always making — stare at someone if you don’t believe us!).

Gaze was even more important. If you’re paying attention to something, you’re usually looking at it, and characters paying attention to different things is a key signal that they’re alive.

“Gaze is super important for character presence – for conveying that they’re aware of you as a player, and aware of whatever’s going on in each environment.”
– Sean Flanagan, Sr. Technical Artist

Throughout the game, our most often-used command for characters is LookAt. LookAt a nearby moving object, LookAt whoever’s talking, LookAt what the player’s handing you. 

Staring, believe it or not, is caring.

Except when we forget a distance check so characters stare at you all the time.

What did you expect?

Players have all sorts of expectations about how they interact with our characters. We had near-endless experiments on what players naturally wanted to do with them: point to them, toss things at them, use their powers on them, wave to them, take selfies with them, play catch with them, even fist bump. 

As a small studio with one (1) animator, it was critical that characters function as systemically as possible. There was no way we could handle the breadth of possible interactions the AAA way.

Staying a Step Ahead

Owlchemy prides itself on meeting and exceeding player expectations, and in this case we solved many of these expectations with procedural animation. You can’t hand-animate a high five because you have no idea where the player’s hand will be. You can’t hand-animate a catch or a toss because you have no idea how well the player threw or where they’ll be to catch.  In fact, we had to create an algorithm to predict where thrown items would end up, so we could have characters’ arms be in the right place at the right time.

Hey Honk, go long!

Admittedly, not all of our characters are equally skilled…

What’s interaction without reaction?

In addition to interactions, characters had to be able to react: to emote, to take their own actions, to happily guzzle a hot cup of Coffeen. Some characters even wind up characterized by, well, NOT responding to you.

No, Gleg will NOT give you a high-five, thank you very much.

In the same way that proper gaze behavior made characters feel alive, ambient responses and emotions made them feel like individuals. Instead of being entirely player-focused, now they had their own agendas and personalities. 

“We made one change and suddenly it was like ‘Oh, they’re people!’”
– Sean Flanagan, Sr. Technical Artist 

We hoped you enjoyed this look at Cosmonious High’s character development! Stay tuned for our next blog on how we gave each character their unique voice, and figured out how to write for a voice-less player, too.