A little person made of numbers and shapes
When people first see my games, they often ask which program I use to make the characters. The answer is a bit surprising: none. The characters are made in code. Every body part is a shape described by numbers: a ball for the head, a rounded box for the torso, capsules (cylinders with half-balls at the ends) for arms and legs. The game puts them together when it starts.
I make games on my own, in my spare time, for fun. If I modelled every bar guest, pupil, patient and knight by hand, I would never finish. Code has another advantage: I can change one number and the character becomes taller, chunkier, or gets a different hair colour. The picture on screen is drawn by a 3D engine that runs in the browser (WebGL, in practice the Three.js library).
One standard for every game
I have nine games: a warehouse, a school, a cemetery, a hospital, a stud farm, a bar, a workshop, a fortress and an arena. Each has its own world, but I wanted the people living in them to look like they come from the same storybook. So I wrote down a character standard, a set of rules that all the games follow. The first model was built in My Bar, and later fixes were carried over to the other games.
The most important rules are these:
- “Chibi” proportions. The head is about 40% of the character's height, the torso and legs are short, and the limbs are thick. Such characters are friendly and easy to see from far away, even on a small phone screen.
- The same skeleton. Every character has a body, a head, two arms and two legs, with elbows and knees. That way animations such as walking, waving or sitting work the same for everyone.
- Smooth, rounded shapes. I changed this after a comment that the body looked “boxy”. Now the corners of the torso are rounded, the limbs are smooth capsules, and the shading is soft instead of sharp.
- Colours and textures made on the fly. A shirt has a light cotton weave, trousers look like denim, a sweater looks knitted. The patterns are generated from code at start-up, so no extra pictures have to be downloaded.
The head and face
The head is the most important part of a character, because that is where we look. It starts as a ball that I bend a little: broader cheekbones, a narrower jaw, a flat face and a slightly pushed-out chin. That way the head looks neither like a cube nor like a football.
The face is simple but carefully arranged. The eyes are small black ovals with a bright glint, as if they reflect the light. The eyebrows sit on the face just above the eyes. The nose is narrow and placed high, and the mouth is a crescent-shaped smile.
Many rules in my standard are a list of mistakes I have already made and fixed. For example, the characters once had pink spots on their cheeks. I heard that they made the characters look like monsters, so now there is no blush at all. Another time a beard was so round that it covered the mouth, so now the mouth always stays visible. Glasses used to sink into the middle of the head, so now their arms run along the skull above the hair.
The hair is one thin layer fitted to the shape of the head. At first I made it from separate locks, but they looked like sausages. Under a cap the hair gets thinner, so nothing pokes through the fabric. I also always look at a character from behind, because it is easy to end up with a bald patch or a strip of skin between the cap and the hair.
Hands, the hardest part
Hands are small, but they do the most: they hold a mug, wave, show a thumbs-up. That is why they have a chapter of their own in my standard.
A hand is mirrored, so the right and left ones are reflections of each other. The thumb always grows from the front edge of the hand, never from the middle. Fingers are small turned rods with a rounded tip, and on top they have a lighter, dome-shaped nail. The nails came back after one version of the hand lost them and I noticed the hand looked worse without them. A raised arm stays next to the head rather than inside it, so the gesture can be seen from the camera.
A hand can take several poses: a clenched fist, an open hand, or a gesture. The poses are swappable, because I only change the shape of the forearm with the hand, and the rest of the body stays the same.
Gestures belong to the game
One thing is not shared, and that is on purpose: gestures. Each game has its own, chosen to fit its world. In My Bar the guests make the “rock horns” sign like at a concert, a victory sign, or a thumbs-up when they like something. At the cemetery, folded hands, a hand on the heart or holding flowers fit better. In the hospital, the school or the stud farm, gestures from those worlds are needed.
The way fingers are built is shared, but what a character does with them I invent separately for each game. For every new gesture I first make a close-up of the hand and check that the fingers are not mixed up. With the victory sign it is easy to get them backwards.
How I check that a character is good
After changing a look, I take screenshots from several sides: front, three-quarter, side and back. I also look at whole catalogues of characters, because a character can look great up close and still blend into the background in the game at the default camera distance.
Characters also have two levels of detail. On a strong device you see the full version, about 20 thousand triangles per character. On a weaker phone the game switches to a simpler one, roughly 12 thousand triangles, while the shapes stay the same. That keeps the game smooth, and the character does not turn into a stranger.
I have one more rule: when I fix something in one game, I write it into the standard and carry it over to the others. That is how the hand fixes worked. They were first made in My Fortress, then moved to My Arena and onwards. Over time my games match each other more and more, and I do not have to invent a character from scratch every time.