Play as a troubled monk on a deep astral journey within. Wielding the skills of your warrior past, face your inner demons, conquer your emotions, and confront your past self in a final battle for inner peace.
The fifth and sixth game projects at The Game Assembly are intertwined, they are both aimed at creating a game inspired by the Diablo series, this year the main inspiration was Diablo 3. Whiles the fifth project focuses on pre-produciton of the game the sixth is actually to develop it. During these project the studio Worm Works created Spite: Catharsis. This was also the first game project built in the game engine, Feather engine, created by the Worm Works programmers.
My field of focus for Spite: Catharsis were the rigs, the main characters, the enemies and the bosses. I also helped to create some animations for both the main boss and one enemy as we were required to have at least five characters in the game.
Download The Monks Rig here
The first rig I created for Spite: Catharsis was the main character, The Monk. This was done during the pre-production stage of the game project. We were given a base skeleton by our educators to build upon, fourth-most due to the graphics students curricular. As all animations students were given the same model to work with, we collaborated with create the base. The base rig was a basic IK/FK rig, with a stretch back. When I then revived the base rig I decided to change some parts to match the animations we wanted for the game.
As the time given for this game project was double as long as usual, I wanted to once again try to create ribbon arms. This would create the possibility to create smear-frames for the movement frames. In addition to the ribbons, I also added a switch for the staff, to follow or not follow the monks hand and the choice whether the monks other hand should follow the staff or not.
The original plan for the rig was to also create ribbon joints for the staff, to be able to create smears for it to. However, we were unable to make two rigs work in tandem in our engine and we were also not able to add two different materials to the same model. As such I had to pivot, leaving the staff as a normal asset mesh which could be parented to a joint in engine.
The Monks Rig
Download Pathos Rig here
Animation
For the main bosses rig, Pathos, I was unable to reuse the monks rig and as such I created it from scratch. My work with ribbons on the Monk proved to be of much use while I created Pathos rig as they have four arms, all of which I wanted to have the option for ribbons. The reason why I wanted to have the option for ribbons was due to Pathos only using their arms for attacks, one of them being a swipe. With ribbon controllers the attack would be more impactful.
However, I didn’t realize that the ribbons also would hinder the animators, as there were a problem with the rotation order. While moving the arms, the ribbon joints would rotate wrongly and create very weird deformations. Sadly we were to far into the project at this time to allow me to change this, which led to the animators needing to counter animate the ribbon joints.
Pathos Rig
Download The Feelings Rig here
When we established what the enemies in Spite: Catharsis were to be, I was adamant on them being of similar builds and as such that they would be able to use the same rig. This was both to allow me time to learn new aspects of rigging but also to lessen the amount of characters our graphic students needed to do. As such, we decided to base the enemies design on the monks design, only adding different masks to distinguish between them.
All the enemies uses the same rig which was created upon the player rig. As non of the enemies were to brandish weapons, as they are reflections of the monks inner feelings, I had to remove the staff from the rig. In addition to this I also created a simple FK mask joint. The masks are a prominent design feature and as such I wanted to make sure that they would be animated upon, even if it was only follow through from the movement of the head.
In the early stages I to have a button to change which mask the enemy had on in Maya to make it easy for the animators to see which feeling they were working with. However, I realized that my time would be better spent on either building the rigs or animating instead of creating additional buttons that would not be used in any important way.
The Feelings Rig
As I was supposed to create three rigs during this project I was not souly in charge of any one character. Instead I helped where there were need. Being three enemies I as such mainly helped with them, but I also worked on a few animations for Pathos.
Sad enemy
Idle
Notice Player
Attack
Death
Pathos
Transition, Angry to Sad
Sad attack, Start
Sad attack, Loop
Sad attack, End
Animation
Philip Anderson
Agnes Bok
Vilma Löfgren
Graphic
Aina Hargne
Jonas Harper
Fredrik Henningson
Maja Rosenvall
Level Design
Pontus Hedenberg
Elias Olsson
Anna Sjöberg
Technical Art
Albin Karlsson
Filip Renemark
Programming
Viktor Andersson
Jesse Emmoth
Hana Mikos
Nils Mårtensson
Linus Svensson
Harry Örnö Persson