Player Design Process

From the start of devel­op­ment, I knew Shh, Zom­bies would be cube based in its mod­els for char­ac­ters and lev­els. I’d found a pro­gram to make these mod­els, Qubi­cle (http://www.minddesk.com/), which would allow me to con­cen­trate on mak­ing the game, and not get side tracked hav­ing to learn how to mod­el in 3DS Max. Below is the play­er design process I went through to reach the final design.

Before any designs were thought about, I’d already decid­ed on a few things that would affect the design of the player:

• The play­er would be cuboid
• The cam­era would be look­ing down on the game area, giv­ing a birds eye view
• I did­n’t want the play­er (gamer) to see just black, the top of the play­ers head

So, with that in mind I drew a sketch of what I was aim­ing for, and mod­elled it in Qubicle:

The head is look­ing up towards the sky, mak­ing it a bit more inter­est­ing for the per­son play­ing the game and giv­ing a bit of a unique, dif­fer­ent look to oth­er games with sim­i­lar look­ing char­ac­ters. How­ev­er, I was­n’t hap­py with this design, he’s too tall and thin, with a tiny head. Next up was the design of the head — its size and place­ment on the body:

It was around this point in the design process that I came across Cubeecraft (http://www.cubeecraft.com/), a web­site that has designs of char­ac­ters from pop cul­ture on cut-out tem­plates to cre­ate cubed ver­sions of them.

From this, I was able to work out the dimen­sions to use, and the amount of vox­els to use for each sec­tion, when build­ing the mod­el in Qubicle.

Final­ly reach­ing the fin­ished design, which has been used for the play­er and two ene­my types.