This is a post that I made for the Zinnia Games Blog: https://zinniagames.com/the-friday-tiding-2-in-the-barrel/

The Friday Tiding #2: In The Barrel

11 Oct, 2024

With most of the debugging work seemingly out of the way for now (Though any developer knows it is only a matter of time before more come out), I am able to move onto other things.

My original plan for this week was to focus on adding in more gimmicks to flesh out the new levels that are in Demo 2, but I ended up focusing on character design instead. An odd turn, but getting out of programming for a while was probably for the best.

Not to say that I didn't do anything at all for the game itself. I added a loading icon for when the game is on a loading screen. This is a small change that lets the player know the game isn't frozen. I also changed some internal rules for how the game can detect specific hitboxes from the player's attacks, which should prove useful for boss fights and other occasions where a specific attack is needed for something.

Though that is about it for actual game work. The rest of my week was spent on researching various topics, from medieval armor to facial expressions to surfer lingo. Certainly a strange combo, but it's all in service to the first major character I want to get down for Project Petunia.

The Villain Kahuna

When I first started on an initial version of Petunia in May, the first character I began to figure out was the villain. An entertaining villain can add a lot to any story, doubly so when the story of your project is relatively simple. There are only going to be two real major characters in Petunia, that being the main villain, and the player character.

Needless to say I need to get this dude right.

So when I first started designing him, my brain almost immediately came up with two things. One, that he'd be in a suit of armor at basically all times. Two, he'd speak like a surfer straight out of the 90s. This combination already stands out for being on the strange side, and we haven't even figured out what he looks like. After this I decided to give a very strong focus to magic for the world that Petunia takes place in. So our surfer knight has now become a wizard too.

While I've done a lot of story and personality work, I want to focus this blog post on the actual look of the character. Specifically, their face.

There are a few goals I want to try and achieve with this design. Most importantly, he needs to look like a douchebag. I also want to end up with a design that isn't hell to animate, and doesn't make him look too old. Finally I want him to look like a surfer, at least somewhat.

The easiest way for me to achieve this was to look around at actual surfers and kinda get an idea of what the 'ideal surfer' of popculture would look like. While I had the idea of giving the villain a mullet at first, this hairstyle doesn't appear much with surfers. Generally surfers either had very short hair, or very long hair. I'm personally biased towards long hair and I think that is generally more associated with surfers so that is what I went with.

This work towards the 'ideal surfer' also informed the rest of the villain's face. I'm pretty happy with how the drafts for his head and face have come out. You can see in the image below that I started with drawing the head, and then after finding a design I liked I started work on drawing various expressions. This is my first time drawing expressions beyond a neutral face so I am very much a newbie when it comes to this stuff.

Even though I only finished drawing this yesterday, it's funny to look at the first draft at the top left and see how quickly the design was iterated on. My original idea for very stringy hair ended up turning into exaggerated dreads, and I kept pushing their size bigger and bigger based on suggestions from an artist discord I hang out in. The stringy hair just didn't end up looking as nice in the simple style I'm going for.

You can also see my struggles with getting the eyes right. Yet another part of art that I really should put more practice into. I ended up drawing a bunch of different variations of eyes and kept trying them out until I ended up with a design for them that I liked.

Sadly, I don't have the full design for this guy down just yet. I still need to design his suit of armor. I decided to focus on his head first though since in the end that is going to be the most important part of him.

A pretty scant post compared to last week, but sometimes these weeklies will just end up that way. Not all the work you put into a project ends up getting represented equally. If you read this to the end, thank you, and see you next week.