Hey folks!

Welcome to the first BattleJuice Alchemist devlog of 2024, where we spill some beans on how we spiced up our headless lorekeeper, Dullahan. This one's for the tech nerds, but I promise it's cool even if you're not into the nitty-gritty stuff.

So, Dullahan is this mysterious old, headless lady who lives among her scrolls and ravens in the supernatural realm surrounding us, the Crossroads. Our artist, Patrick, had this idea to take it up a notch technically. Dullahan should have a flowing cape and candles on her back.

Usually, we use only a single texture, which determines the colors for a character. In modern games, a 3D asset usually has multiple textures: There is something called PBR (Physically Based Rendering), where you add textures providing the information on how bumpy or reflective a surface is. We don't use PBR because our game is all about that hyper-stylization. But Patrick came to me with this plan - add a second texture file that stores different information.

The new file tells the engine how wind should mess with Dullahan's cape and how much the candle's flames should glow.

Wind Effects (Blue Channel): Dullahan's cape is swaying in the wind, even though our animations are as simple as it gets and the cape is not animated. It just moves, where we paint blue into the new texture. That's the magic of the texture's blue channel right there.

Glow (Red Channel): Dullahan's candles now glow. There is no particle system, just a simple plane for the flame as part of the 3D model. It moves, because of the blue channel and thanks to the red channel, we can crank up the glow intensity in specific spots. With our post-processing applied, Dullahan looks like this:

We can even expand on the system by making use of the currently empty green channel and the alpha channel of our new texture later on.

"Why secondary motion?" you may ask. Our animations are deliberately simple, but throwing in some secondary motion is like adding a sprinkle of magic. It's the reason puppets like those in Sesame Street often have fur - extra motion that makes the character more lively and does not need to be animated manually.

Patrick's idea turned out to be great, and I am glad he nagged me to implement it. Check out Dullahan inside the game:

As we keep pushing what we can do with such a small team, these tech tweaks help us keep things stylish yet immersive. We're stoked about how Dullahan turned out, and we hope you agree.

Stick around for more behind-the-scenes shenanigans and thank you for reading!

Alain