Behind The Scenes - Character Design & Implementation (Patreon)

We've got a new behind the scenes post ready for you guys. This one covers the entire process that we go through when implementing a new character portrait to the game.

Our primary focus in this post is Antoinette, the new puppet antagonist.

Step 1 - Brainstorming

Before any actual work takes place, we first make sure that we’re on the same page about the role that this character is meant to fill in the game or story. In Antoinette’s case, we set the following design pillars to base her around.

Last survivor of a race of puppet demons.

Has a vendetta against Charlotte’s family.

Sadistic and spiteful.

Delusional in her status as princess.

Along with this, we threw together some visual ideas in a moodboard using Milanote.

Various inspiration artworks as well as some of Doku’s early sketches were placed on there as a reference. We both thought multiple arms were really cool but more on that in a second.

Step 2 - Initial Sketches

From here, Doku takes these ideas and tries to twist them in a unique way. There’s a fair amount of trial and error at this point, since the sketch doesn’t always come out perfect. Though we have had a few characters that come out great on the first draft and we just go from there. (Mira…)

We ended up flushing this one because it just wasn’t good enough and looked way too messy. At first, we were thinking about giving her 6 arms, but that was way too much work to draw constantly and would create an animation nightmare. We ended up bringing them down to just 4 arms.

Eventually, we do reach a point where we’re happy with the concept sketch and move on to the full artwork creation process.

Step 3 - Creating the Artwork

Fortunately, Doku recorded this part of the work!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5cMLmDWTGy8

This is about 22 hours crammed into 1 minute, so it’s extremely fast but you can see the artwork go from sketch to complete.

Step 4 - Rigging & Animation

This is where Doku hands off the artwork for me to work in engine. Works are saved in PSB format so that Unity can automatically split the layers and save us some time.

The video posted above in the post show cases my sided of the workload. In total, this part takes about 6-8 hours, which have been compressed into 11 minutes.

There are various parts to this side of the work and I’ll try my best to explain them in order.

Rigging: The sprite comes split into multiple parts by Doku. The first step is to add bones and create the meshes that will allow me to animate them later. Project Cappuccino 1 didn’t have this system and we instead had to just animate around pivot points. I’m sure to be mindful about which bones will control what, since some are manually animated and others will work with hinge joint physics.

Sprite Hierarchy and Structure: After rigging is complete the character is dropped into the scene hierarchy. Here I make sure that bones are nested under the body part they’re meant to control in order to keep things neat. I also mess with some things required by our other systems like added a few scripts and making sure the portrait is centered. Things like sprite masks are added to the whites of the eyes so that the pupils can move around.

Animation: This is sometimes the hardest part of the process since it requires repeatedly scrubbing the key frames. Characters in Project Cappuccino 2 have about 5-8 expressions each, with the exception of Charlotte that has her frenzy mode stuff too. In NSFW scenes, the animation part takes longer since we need to account for toys that the player may use.

Shaders & Effects: This part only applies to some characters. Antoinette for example needed to have the soul ball (looks like cum) appear ghostly. The video shows me trying various things and eventually settling on just using a wave shader to make it wobble. A small subtle light source is added to it as well and the puppet head is tethered to her using a hinge joint.

Testing & Polish: The final step is to test the portrait with our existing Dialogue System. I plug it in to my debugging script and make sure that she shows up and cycles through all of her expressions properly.

When this part is finished, we’re basically done with the work. The sprite is ready to use in game and plug in to the dialogue system.

That about covers the entire process. With both of our time accounted for, adding a character like this takes somewhere from 15-40 hours depending on complexity or issues we may run into. Pre-existing characters such as Sophie tend to be faster as opposed to a new character designed from scratch.

We hope you enjoyed this look into some of the work we do!

Vanis & Doku