Hey folks,

this week I'd like to take you on a deep dive of how Patrick and I created a new enemy for BattleJuice Alchemist. Although I enjoyed being a solo dev a lot, I love working collaboratively like this. But this brings the challenge to establish pipelines and workflows as a team, where ideally everybody does what they are best at. So let me tell you how this little raven fella came into existence!

Patrick is an illustrator and animator by trade and has been helping me out for years before joining on a permanent basis now. He helped ironing out our art bible, so I did not need to explain to him any details of our guidelines and what we go for thematically and visually. I thought it best to make the skeleton and animations for our new winged enemy type myself, because Patrick does not work with them inside Unreal like I do. I wanted to get this done quickly without a lot of tinkering, so I asked Patrick to make a concept for our general bird skeleton. He came up with this within a few hours:

You can't imagine how much time this saved me. I am not good at visualizing concepts so I usually go into 3D right away and this sometimes turns out to not be very time efficient. But with Patrick's concept, I was able to create our bird skeleton really quick.

I then made the animations while Patrick started making the 3D model for the raven. As you can see, the bones in the skeleton are not bones as you would usually shape them for a flying creature: You would usually only make the bones of the wings, not the wing itself (a bit like Patrick illustrated them in green in his concept). I shaped the bones like full wings to be able to see how they overlap due to our segmented style.

In BattleJuice Alchemist we do not skin our characters, we segment them into individual pieces. This is not just an economic decision, but also because we are nostalgic for this art style. I asked Patrick if he wanted to say something about this...

"I’m a big fan of highly stylized game looks. Also working with segmented low poly characters, hand-drawn textures and cel shading creates unique design challenges.

For instance, imagine you’re trying to draw a classic cartoon chracter but it has multiple demon forms and was just frozen and shattered. Now you’re searching for pieces - wait which head is this or is it an arm? Will this edge be cel shaded or do I draw this outline myself? And remember, squares are divine and green is for demons! Well, working on BJA designs almost feels like ritual magic and I’m loving it."

In case you are wondering, he is referring to our color palette here, which does not allow the color green in any type or form ;) So Patrick made our raven model and textures and also designed the mutated variations.

I really like how everything came together and had a blast working on this. The raven is a very simple creature and I am sure you will be blown away with the more complex characters Patrick is currently designing.

This devlog has become long enough so I have to end it now. Have a great weekend everyone!

Alain