» The Making of a Protagonist, Part I

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I've been busy at work on this game! I've not done any programming work lately – which I feel a bit guilty about – however! I've been improving in the 3D modelling department. I started modelling a humanoid character, based on references and my personal ideas, to become my new protagonist for Project N5. Here's what I've been able to do so far, and how I managed to get to this point.

Laura

My new protagonist is called Laura. This is a change from my original idea, where I would have a robot protagonist, but more on that further down.

Laura is a 20-something year old human girl fitted with a mechanical right arm. This is supposed to affect gameplay as well, since Laura's left-handed, which reflects both in the way she holds weapons as well as in the game's aiming perspective, which will look over her left shoulder as opposed to her right. I think this is fairly uncommon, actually, so it might take a little bit of time to get used to, but I like the idea of straying from the norm ever so slightly.

With her mechanical right arm, Laura may also be able to perform actions such as using zip lines. I haven't entirely decided on that yet, though.

This is what I've created so far:

I'll admit, I'm actually quite proud of myself for being able to create this. This is a fairly representative humanoid body, with relatively decent topology and without using a massive amount of polygons – this model currently sits at 2,452 tris.

The features aren't entirely fleshed out yet, though there are also a few things I want to keep in mind when creating this model:

• There won't be much character customisation. There'll be some outfits (more on that below) but those are, for the most part, bound to the story progression.
• I'll do some touchups on the joints to get them to bend better.
• There's no skeleton yet.
• The right arm is only in place because I'm using a mirror modifier on the whole body. I'll chop off the right arm once I get to modelling the mechanical arm replacement.

The future vision is to give her two outfits: one in which she starts, which looks more like a casual outfit, wearing a hoodie with the right sleeve torn off. It's supposed to look like an outfit that's not really meant for combat, because it's the one she wore before her hibernation. The second outfit is supposed to be a more combat-suited outfit, perhaps a type of armour even.

For the next progress update, I'll be able to show a largely finished model – I promise!

Story Changes

There's reason for these ideas I have for Laura, and it's all in the story I am developing.

The New Storyline

Laura is a young girl waking up from a hundred-years-long hibernation. Her home – Sol III (Earth) – has been devastated. Before her hibernation, she lost her right arm, which has been replaced with a mechanical arm by a robot at some point during her hibernation. She doesn't get to meet this robot immediately, as they're gone when she wakes up (or perhaps is taken away?).

Project N5 is the story of Laura rediscovering what caused the devastation of her home as well as what happened to the robot that saved her life.

How to Adapt the Old Storyline

Gone is the robot protagonist. Gone is the titular Project N5, for which the protagonist had been built. Gone is the company that the protagonist was built by, and against whom the protagonist swore revenge. I struggled massively with developing this storyline, even just coming up with a general plot that sounded interesting. I think this is good riddance. This wasn't going anywhere.

This isn't a full rework, however – many aspects remain. The weapons remain, the ideas for planets and space stations remain, etc. The idea of revolving the story around Sol III and basing the story on environmental ruin still very much remains!

Inspiration

Believe it or not, most of the inspiration I was able to gather to come up with this new storyline stems from one song: acloudyskye – Spill.

The striking, saturated colours, the feeling of adventure, the sense of loneliness in a large world – all of these aspects combine beautifully in this song and its cover art. It gave me ideas which I want to realise in my game.

acloudyskye's music has inspired me quite a bit lately, especially their albums What Do You Want! and There Must Be Something Here. Absolutely recommend listening to them.

Likely Future Changes

Game Title

I suppose the title Project N5 inherently sounds like a work-in-progress title. A codename of sorts.

Since the whole idea of the in-game Project N5 won't be developed any further, I figure this is the start of a goodbye. A new title will have to come. I haven't decided on one yet, and I think it'll be quite some time until I'll actually settle on a new title, perhaps not until much of the story has already been developed.

For now, Project N5 remains the working title. Don't get too attached to it!

Aesthetics

As I'm moving from working on the game's logic to the aesthetic (which does NOT mean the logic is anywhere near finished!), I'm considering starting to implement shaders. I've decided that I'll likely use a toon-style shader, perhaps a variation of this one. Looking forward to playing around with the visuals!

I also have a vision for the 3D models, which I may have already mentioned: I'm planning to use (almost?) exclusively materials for the models' visuals. I'm trying to avoid textures, for multiple reasons:

• Textures cannot be smoothly scaled up in resolution, whereas models that exclusively use materials and polygons for detail don't depend on an image's pixel resolution.
• Painting textures is hard!

Some low-poly 3D modelling artists use textures for shadows, which I think is cool, although I'm planning to use shaders and generated shadows in my game instead, so painted shadows are likely unnecessary.

Next Steps

Next, I'll continue modelling Laura. I most recently worked on her head, where I'm still deciding whether to give her a half-face mask or a full face shield. Doing a half-face mask will enable Laura to emote with her eyes, but that means I'll have to implement eyes, which could be difficult, so using a full face shield that just completely blocks her face would be easier. I could make it work in the story too. I'll model her hair, add some ears (probably), and then I'll get to modelling her mechanical right arm. Afterwards, I'll likely rig it.

Once I've done that, I'll save this model as a baseline 3D model and then edit a copy of it to add clothes – I want the clothes to be part of the model rather than go on top of the existing mesh, I think.

After that, I could start animating Laura, though I don't know whether I'll get to that in the next progress update. It could be cool! I'll have to find a way to add and update animations in Godot without re-importing the 3D model. I think a way exists using NLA tracks, but I'll have to learn how to do this, and whether this works the way I imagine.

I've already made sketches for how I want to style Laura; this could be fun!