Character design was one of the last and most daunting projects, mostly because I am by no means an artist. I did the usual google searching, looking at tons of ideas and reference art. I knew it had to fit the low poly style, but also wanted it to be a more basic style that I could easily repeat for my hundreds of NPCs. Borrowing from the typical cartoons, anime, video games, and low poly worlds, I drew my first character. After much refining, I had a basic model. From there, of course, I wrote a ton of Python (& AHK) to replicate this model in a pseudo-random way. I was able to input a handful of characteristics, and get hundreds of faces to choose from. For the bodies, I created a few spreadsheets, of course, mostly based on village and lore, to keep the outfits consistent. Finally I was able to efficiently create the characters I needed for each chapter. Then I created the main playable characters. I used the same process, then spent far more time perfecting every feature. The outfits were also more unique and more closely related to lore. Now I had the 3D Blender characters I needed :)

Animation - Gameworld
After researching and watching plenty of YouTube, I had an idea of the walk cycle I was going to use. I took a crash course on Blender bones and rigging, and I was ready to go! And of course, I used Python (& AHK) to create a script that moved the model and shot the images from all four angles. Now that I had each animation frame, it was time to learn Unity's animation controller. After more research and YouTube videos, I have animated NPCs walking around the gameworld :) I of course used the same process for the actually playable character, adding the other 4 angles for 8 direction movement.

Animation - Battle
This was another daunting project, but after tons of research, I came across this video that I really loved (Mariel gave an AMAZING talk!) I at least knew what animation style and concepts I wanted. Now another crash course, this time on Unity's bones and rigging system, and PSD importer. This was a far more difficult task, with many small nuances that I initially overlooked. But the end result was full, fluid, fun, and cool (imo) battle animations! As a matter-of-fact, so far I've created 143 different animations. Some are small variations, some are just going from idle to active, and some are full on 5-hit Sword Techs! In the end, once the workflow was finalized, imagining, sketching, then creating battle animations became one of my favorite projects :)

Enemies
When I originally created the enemy races while planning my game mechanics, I knew that most of the enemies would be humanoid. So I ran my Blender Python with some extreme settings to get some very unique faces, and then chose the ones that resembled the race I was going for. I of course then spent plenty of time refining the face/head to truly look like a troll, or goblin, or ogre, etc. Then I used that as a template to build the multiple classes/types, male, female, soldier, princess, etc. Using plenty of reference art, I was able to create bodies to match each race, and some pretty fun outfits. All in all, the enemy creation process was much more fun than I had originally expected! Maybe I am sort of an artist. Using humanoid enemies allowed me to used the same animations for both the gameworld and battle :) I do plan at some point to also create some non-humanoid enemies.

Misc
There were two other parts of the character design and implementation that proved to be decent sized projects as well. The first was the character model in the Pause Screen that displays what gear the member currently has equipped. The concept was fairly straightforward, but the implementation took quite a bit of time. Mostly figuring out the foreground and background layers, which can change depending on the gear. Also, determining each gear's center point from the face forward view, and what part of the backside of the gear is "removed" to appear like it is actually being worn by the character. The end result turned out well, with a smiling party member having gear freely added and removed :) The second was adding the gear and Firanite (glowing stones) to characters in battle. This should have been a straightforward rigging solution, but Unity makes this quite a bit more tricky than it needs to be. Once the problem was solved, and the camera angles and pivot points of the weapons were determined, the gear animated with the characters quite well. Displaying the proper (color) Firanite with it's glow (individual Unity light) ended up being a ton of code, but totally worth it in the end. So now go and setup your gear with your favorite Firanite patterns, and see it live in action on the battlefield!