YEAR 3 - BA3b - Tutorial Helper design

This image shows the development of 'Buddy', the players tutorial sidekick (and sidekick in the single player adventure?).

I knew I just wanted them to be a small alien looking creature that has a resemblance to the main character.

In the early concepts I tried out just one eye and played with the idea of Buddy having a hover bar too.

You can see from number 4 onward I tried keeping the 4 eye motif before coming up with the skull shape.





In number 8 I tried different sized eyes and that made the 2 upper ones look like eyebrows and Buddy was pulling an impatient face. I really liked the personality this game the character so in number 9 I reduced the eyes down to 2 and made them more expressive. I also added ears, that I could animate a future date to show expression too.

This gif shows the character in game. I animated it's movement similarly to the sin wave squares in the background and made it follow the players position. I also made the ears separately so that they drift behind the character, giving it more life. Buddy's idle animation is just blinking but he looks left and right when the player has stood still for too long; all in the hopes of giving Buddy a bit more life as a character.

I recently reworked the character select room in the game too to allow the players to customize their alien. The players can push left and right to change the hue and up and down to change the saturation.

Hopefully this should allow players to associate more closely with their character and I'd still like to add a cosmetic item unlock system eventually.