New San, new life

Out with the old and in with the new!

San has a new design!

Yeap, we changed how he looks, how he animates and even how he interacts with the environment and his spear. After an exhausting design and review process we ended up with a cool new version of our main character.

New San on the LEFT and old San on the RIGHT

A Photoshop mockup. Actual size of the final character in-game is slightly different.

Of course the change wasn't done just like THAT. There were tons of studies done, TONS!

So, the focus for the new designs was to try and find a more likable and relatable character while also improving upon the original design. We also needed to give more emphasis in to the character movements and the way he can express himself so we started heading towards a slightly taller character, testing new forms, colors and other options for his eyes.

You can still ear the sad voices of all these characters saying "pick me... pick me... pick me..."

A chord was struck, the design started to lean more towards the taller characters. Also... COLORS!

Some final attempts to try something completely different and opposite. Note: one of these is not like the others.

We were all a bit worried when trying to change the character into something new as everyone in the team got attached to the "old" San. But the future is here... or there... it's somewhere, I guess. So there... or here?

That's it! We are really happy with the new design and the team is happily working on a lot of other things that we can't wait to show you. Mainly how the new San is animated! We will show it on our next blog post.

Don't forget to follow Out of Line on Twitter on take a bigger leap of faith and follow some of the team's personal Twitter accounts (we are not responsible for what you find there).

The Official account - Out of Line @outofline_game
The Visionary - Francisco Santos @FranciscoMSart
The Programmer - João Genebra @genebruhh
The Producer - Diogo Vasconcelos @diogostuart
The Co-Producer - Filipe Duarte Pina @FilipeDPina
The Designer -  Wilson Almeida @foolean_logic

Get the point, double joint?

Character animations

Hi there, Out of Line followers!
So much stuff to talk about!...and ...PRESS START!

Character Animation
If you are a fan (which we know you are... yes, YOU), you've noticed the way San moves has changed a lot since production started. He now moves STYLISHLY :)

San running in Unity engine

The reason for this is that we decided to completely revamp the way we animate our characters.
Our previous prototypes were made with frame-by-frame animations. This looked cool enough but presented a lot of challenges and limitations. It took a long time to animate, changing something was very painful as it meant redoing entire animations, we were limited to what type of interactions we could do, yada, yada, yada, the list is LONG!

So we decided to change to a 2D skeleton type of animation. We know a lot of games have been doing this now for some time, but it only became obvious this way was the way to go after we did it. This is a typical thing in videogame development, try things, they don't work as intended, try new things and so on. Keep doing this until you get it right.

The new animation system has a lot of advantages
- Easier to animate, create new animations, change them, etc.
- Animation is always dynamic and fluid since it is all skeleton based
- We can have IK for San's legs. This allows him to stand correctly in tilted terrain, respond to platform movements and even stand on his own spear!

Doesn't have
- A cool looking old school animation style
- More control over stretch and squash

Frame by frame

Skeleton based

Status of development
Overall work is going nicely, lot's of new things to talk about in the upcoming weeks and months.
The PlayStation 4 build is looking steady and stable and the team keeps working hard.
Expect some details on a new cool mechanic on our next blog post!

That's it!
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter!
See you later, alligator!