For our third blog post about our Oculus Rift Game The Fisherman and the Stars, I am going to talk a bit about how time restraints led to the design of our animals.

When I finally got around to designing the animals we only had a few days left in the jam.  I knew I did not have much time to create each animal.  Because of these restraints the question became–how to convey the essence of a frog in a simple and clear manner?  This led to looking at each animal and trying to capture the essence of each in two ways: the animation of the creature and the way it moves in the world. Shea was working on the code side to implement the animals movement.  For me it was modeling each animal to capture the essence of its form and adding a simple animation to convey its personality.

I will just discuss the frog, as it is my favorite animation.  Before I even started looking at images I knew that when I think of frogs, I think of their iconic throat.

The question of what to animate was pretty simple. Animate the throat, properly called the vocal sac.  Then the question became, how to model the frog?  As this was the first animal to model it would set the design of the 3 subsequent animals.  Again time restraints dictated a simple form.  So working with the established style of the game I decided for a simple geometric form.  This would allow for easy modeling and texturing.  It also meant the personality of the frog would be conveyed almost entirely through the animation and movement, which was on target with original intentions.

Having a simple geometric form also seemed to contrast well with the slightly more organic design of the fauna.  The hope is that moving forward we can elaborate on this distinction to develop different personalities for the flora and fauna of the game.

All in all I am pleased with how the animals turned out. The way the frog hops about the world, coupled with it’s subtle throat animation and an ambient loop of croaks, seems to really capture the felling of frogs populating the world. Below is the frog running its animation in the unity editor.

There is much more to say about our jam month.  Tomorrow the finalists are announced.  Here is to hoping for a nomination, as any help we can get to raise awareness/money for this project increases the time we can dedicate to working on the Fisherman and the Stars.

Thanks for Reading.