In progress: Polly & the gang

I'm currently busy with creating some modular characters. "What does modular mean?", you might ask. It means I'm creating all the body-parts separately, so I create a body-shape and a head-shape and then I create ears, eyes, mouth, arms, legs, etc. I still head some ears and eyes that I was happy about from an earlier attempt to make modular characters. But I wasn't able to create human characters that I was satisfied with. So I switched to teddybear-like characters and so far I'm happy with the result.

As you can see, I'm furthest with the white polar bear, who I named Polly. I exported the seperate bodyparts and I will now go through the course SPRITER 2D Humanoid Character Rigging & Animation for Unity by Billy McDaniel on Udemy. I have used Spriter and/or Dragon Bones before to animate my Cleopatra character, but I'm in dire need of a refresher. I don't think it matters the course is 'for Unity', I can also use the animations in GameMaker. In the mean time I am following the Udemy course How to Make Tile Based Platform Games in Gamemaker by Peter Morgan, which I can really recommend for starting or hobbyist gamedevs. I really like the teaching method of Peter and he updates the course when there are significant updates on GameMaker Studio 2. I was planning to do this course to be able to make a showcase for my tilesets, but then I also wanted my own characters and art in there, so eventually it'll probably turns into a full game (or at least one or two levels).

Meet the gang

I already introduced Polly, the polar bear who is closest to completion. But who are these other guys? Starting from top left we have Piggy and next to him Hoggy. Below them is Teddy, who was my actual starting character and Blacky. And then on the last row, who might become more or villians, we got Fishy and Batty. Don't shame me about my naming conventions, they're just working names to keep them organized in the layers of Inkscape.

By the way, these are just 4 characters (and a couple of skin recolours) I'm working with now, but with the modular setup I can easily create other characters. And since they all will have very similar bodypart sizes, in Spriter I can create a 'rig' for animations (like walking, running, jumping, idle, etc.) that I can reuse for each character. I like creating these kind of templates for myself. Like the kids say these days: Work smarter, not harder.

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