Character profile: Kat

(Technical stuff rant can be found at the end of this post)

So there she is, the imaginary friend of Luciano, Kat. Her design is based on my cat a long time ago, with the crown to emphasize how much of a princess she was.

Her role in Luciano's mind is as the one who moves the body. In short, she's the brain, the logic, the one who sits in the mind reading a book with the title: Luciano's muscle memory. The brain is a muscle, isn't it? All the logics and knowledge are therefore stuck in your brain because you've "thought" that way before, therefore you memorized the way the brain's muscle flexes.

All in all, Kat is the one who the players will be playing as. The game will have a very big psychological aspect to it, in which you(as Kat) has to decide what to do based on the body(Luciano)'s wants, and at the same time, has to pass the morality test performed by Doc(a dog), which is this other imaginary friend.

Doc will be coming soon, I can't wait to make him.

Because Kat is the more significant imaginary friend(simply because the player is playing as her, within Luciano's mind), she gets some character stats that the player can't freely adjust. Here it is:

Str:99
Agi:99
Int:99
Vit:99
Dex:99
Luk:99

Passives: Dash, Wall jump, Stealth.
Actives: All magic spells in the game.

Seems pretty imbalanced, eh? Well, you only literally play as Kat in Luciano's Dream, which happens after every episode or whenever you choose to sleep. Any other time, you play as Kat, controlling Luciano's body, in the game's reality.
The Dream only acts as the time when the game goes into mission briefing part, or contemplating some stories, and so on.

The other way you can play as Kat is when you Daydream, that is when you choose to stand still and gives up Luciano's control, and start moving around in reality as Kat. When this mode is active, Kat can only go to places where it's within Luciano's view.


So that's it about Kat's character profile. I will now rant about some technical stuff.

First of all, working with low poly characters is insane. Kat is at 2238 polys, 510 of which are her fur+eyelash+whiskers.
The body is 1130 polys. With just this much, she has to bend and do some funky acrobatics.
I made a big mistake on joint length as well. The bone from the pelvis to knee, and knee to ankle, has to be fairly equal. If not, your model can't sit properly. I redid the joint chains, but it's still not quite right.

I realized a proper joint chain is not the only thing. For a quadruped, the thigh area deforms so much that it's probably a good idea to add a few more edge loop there. That part is basically a super stretched piece of skin that gets pulled by the knee. I was banging my head as I weight paint that part, but now I learned enough to do better next time.

I'm lucky Kat is basically a ball of fur. When I make a normal cat, however, I think I'll need to adjust the mesh again...


Another thing was, I was planning to upload a video of Kat in-game, with free movements as I go around the game scene. But as I was importing and arrange the animation clips, I realized the character movement script is very programmatically wrong. Right now I have a bool check for when the character is running/not, grounded/not, and so on. While I was doing the monster AI, I was making State Machines, and I guess this is the time I go back to some old codes and re-make everything based on that single state paradigm.
The same method that gets called on each transition of the character's movement state can then be also used to trigger the animation. Right now, it's a mess, and working with Unity's Mecanim will mean having to write separate methods again...

So yes, that's what I'll be doing next: fix character movement states.
After that, make a proper demo game in the dream state, and then you can try out the game, as Kat!
Awesome?
Awesome!

Cheers