Designing for the game
"Grove Guardian" is a horde game taking place in an enchanted bioluminescent mushroom forest, where the forest spirit fights to protect its home from an invasive species.
I imagined the forest spirit as a delicate, yet powerful character, that is deeply connected to its home.
Concept
In my initial sketch, I designed the forest spirit as a mushroom nymph. I removed the mushroom headpiece to ensure players could easily spot incoming enemies. The design became clearer once I switched to digital.
Modelling
The model's legs are intentionally short, so as to avoid dress interference. I enhanced the dress and hair topology for smoother animations. Due to skinning issues and time constraints, I shortened the dress and removed the sleeves.
UV and Texturing
To achieve the spirit effect, I used the engine's shader graph. Although expected, I avoided the addition of transparency to facilitate clarity and to avoid undesired effects in combination with backface rendering.
Simulating
Initially, I planned to simulate hair and dress movement in Maya, bake animations and export to the game engine. However, Unity's limitations led me to rig and animate them instead.
Rigging and Skinning
I used Mixamo's auto rigger and added controls with a script in Maya. I had skinning issues resulting in the dress not following the character's body, so in the end I opted to use only skirt layers.
Animating
The required gameplay animations included movement and abilities. I reused animations where possible and created an extra idle loop to use in the main menu.
See how all animations look like in-game:
See more about this
You can check out the project page here for a brief introduction to the project or you can experience the game by clicking on the button below.
