Slice and dice through the Temple of Mold!

Purge the infected vegetables and discover the evil plans of The Alchemist.

The fourth game project at The Game Assembly was an top down adventure game. Taking inspiration from Tunic, the studio Wizard Geese created the game The Gourdian, a goofy game in which you need to defeat the Magic Mushroom before he turns the world into mold.

The Gourdians Rig

While working on The Gourdian I was in charge of everything animation related to the main character, the Gourdian. As such I both rigged, skinweighted and animated all animations for the player character.

Download The Gourdians Rig here

Animation

The rig for the Gourdian is a modified IK/FK rig. As I wanted to be able to move both the arms, legs and head away from the body, the controllers are connected with a parent constraint instead of a simple orient constraint. Further, to be able to animate the cutting board on the Gourdians back, it also have a controller. However, as you never see the Gourdian without the cutting board I decided to skinpaint the strap for it to both the body and the board instead of creating more joints alone the body. This was of course a limitation for the animations as I was unable to animate the band, but it lessen the workload enough for it to be acceptable.

During the creation of The Gourdian I also wanted to learn how to create ribbon arms and legs, this was also a reason for the simple rig. In an earlier version of the rig I had something akin to ribbon arms, but as I’d challenged myself to create them without the input from a educator they didn’t work as intended and I scraped them.

As mentioned before, I was in charge of all animations relating to the main character, the Gourdian. The goal for the animations was to give the character a goofy feel to match the game and art style. It was also important that the time between interacting with a button and the execution of the action was as minimal as possible and as such give the game a snappy feel.