Big, big eight-day week, yes go ahead spot the mistake :)
I have to admit, until now I’ve never really crunched in any of the studios I worked in (hugs to everyone by the way). But this time it’s my game, I’m not getting paid for it yet anyway so… I do what I want the way I want, and I make my team work like slaves (the joys of solo dev, there’s more than one of you in your head) !!!
Anyway, I reworked Archibald Figgs, the main character, using Meshy 6. This time I pushed the mesh work further: manual retopology, seams, UV unwrap, texture cleanup and a bake with BaseColor and a Normal map. I had already made the head separately with the same process, adding a bit of sculpting for more details.
Two small days of work and a very satisfying result: 16K polygons versus 260K, with great quality.
I also reworked the portraits to better match the art direction. The main challenge was avoiding the hand-drawn look and moving toward a hyper-realistic style. I like the slightly plastic effect, with strong shapes and acid colors, I think it fits this quirky, paradise-like universe really well.
Honestly I’m so tired of games with desaturated colors and gloomy themes. This one has to smell like hot sand and virgin mojitos (yes I’m keeping it family friendly) !
Back to the programmer’s desk, I added a Clues system to my PlayerInventory to mark the player’s discoveries. This will also be super useful to trigger events.
I slipped in a feature to do fade-to-black transitions. A very awaited feature by my whole team made of me and myself. It will also let me be lazy with lots of ellipses. While I was at it I added an ellipse system too.
On the inventory side, I added a little thumbnail following the mouse to give feedback when you select an item, and the option to cancel the selection with a right-click.
I also reworked the UI, especially for dialogues.
After that I did some debugging to tackle the ever-growing list of bugs and tasks.
Then I added two female characters chatting on sun loungers, along with their dialogue.
Also after some trials I wasn’t really satisfied with my main character’s animations, so I modified the base image to regenerate a 3D model.
This time I inserted the portrait directly into the edit and generated everything in one go. Then I did a remeshing straight on the Meshy website and projected it onto the high-poly model with a shrinkwrap to bake everything.
Just to see. And well, the truth is it has fewer details but it’s more consistent, and the Meshy model is way better than the previous one. So I decided to use the new model, the third one, and throw away two days of work.
I think you shouldn’t be afraid of sunk cost bias. Losses and profits. I might even redo Archibald’s model four or five times.
And finally I reworked the entire dialogue with Axel Loth. Axel Loth was originally a private joke after a chat with Meshy’s community manager, the joke started with remaking a 3D model of a cocktail he liked.
One thing led to another and I ended up creating a slightly caricatured character, hat and outfit a bit Crocodile Dundee style (yes I know that’s Australian), a somewhat local-sounding voice and…
And that’s how I got pulled in. I added lore to the character. The lore fit nicely with the dialogues. And since the result matched the theme and the setting really well…
Well, Axel Loth ended up as a main character.
