HEDGEWITCH - stylized lowpoly game concept
polycounter lvl 9
Hi everyone! In my down time I'm currently working on a little stylized project of mine called 'Hedgewitch.' I'm pretty noob when it comes to developing in an engine so while I'm approaching this with the idea that it would be a playable game, in reality it'll probably just end with me throwing the assets into Unreal and praying for some demonic miracle haha.
Hedgewitch is a farming sim and management project where the player is a young witch trying to get her footing in the world. It draws a lot of inspiration from the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series, Fantasy Life and Kiki's Delivery service. You play as Blubell, who has just moved into a town lacking a local witch, and your goal is to farm your land to produce magical plants to craft potions and spells, while helping the village locals, selling your goods and making a name for yourself. I'd like to imagine it would also include exploration, combat and questing. Possibly monster taming as well (eg needing to harvest honey from a fairy hive to create a new potion, collecting molted feathers and scales from your cockatrice) and a complex crafting system where you could develop your own unique spells and potions based on ingredients.
At the moment I'm playing around with the style and ideas. If you have suggestions for things you'd like to imagine would be in the 'game,' or asset ideas for me to model, throw them my way!
This was her first costume design but wasn't very happy with it, I didn't feel it was witchy enough and was too complex.
Hedgewitch is a farming sim and management project where the player is a young witch trying to get her footing in the world. It draws a lot of inspiration from the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series, Fantasy Life and Kiki's Delivery service. You play as Blubell, who has just moved into a town lacking a local witch, and your goal is to farm your land to produce magical plants to craft potions and spells, while helping the village locals, selling your goods and making a name for yourself. I'd like to imagine it would also include exploration, combat and questing. Possibly monster taming as well (eg needing to harvest honey from a fairy hive to create a new potion, collecting molted feathers and scales from your cockatrice) and a complex crafting system where you could develop your own unique spells and potions based on ingredients.
At the moment I'm playing around with the style and ideas. If you have suggestions for things you'd like to imagine would be in the 'game,' or asset ideas for me to model, throw them my way!
This was her first costume design but wasn't very happy with it, I didn't feel it was witchy enough and was too complex.
Replies
Scope control does a body good, so you should consider how much you want this to be crafting and farming versus needing to also design a combat system etc. How many people are working on this?
Looks very cute, I love the artstyle. Isn't your character way too high poly though?
The eyes and mouth look like something you could do on a texture on separate faces and change with an animation, and even if you want to animate her face by moving vertices it shouldn't be necessary to model the iris like that.
I understand you want to keep simple light textures but it seems to me you'll end up with super heavy models. (then again I don't know much in general)
The character in particular is fairly high poly considering the style; that's because of the texturing technique I'm using. Basically I model out areas that are going to be specific colours on the mesh, and when unwrapping I reduce the uv island down as much as I can on the pixel texture sheet. This makes the colours REALLY crisp and smooth and means I can use a tiny diffuse while still getting a lot of style in. But because of that, I cant really texture any details in on the diffuse map itself, I have to actually model in the geometry. That's why her eyes have so many polys - they're actually pieces of floating geometry overlapping so I can have nice colour on them.
(Some assets like the bottle and spellbook are higher res so I can include readable text in)
I guess the style is not actually very low poly, it's more like I'm trying to FAKE a low poly look with the texturing. I really want to find a balance between simple shapes and detail, I usually do a lot of detailed handpainted stuff so the challenge is really refreshing!
As for the game scope, I'm not actually intending to make a full playable game out of it. At most I'd like to come up with a semi-playable demo, with an environment you can run around in as the character. I don't know enough programming and engine stuff to accomplish it myself, so my scope is kind of a pretend 'If I was going to seriously make this a game this is what I'd like to include!'
Too funny, I actually prefer the first version of the witch you did. Wouldn't mind seeing a bit more separation of the different elements. I'm talking about shading or tinting....example: The boots have a folded over top below the knee, I'd love to see a lighter gray used for that element to contrast the main part of the boot. The model looks too flat and would benefit some subtle shading and darkening around joints. Are you using any sort of vert shading? I'd highly recommend you vertex color sections of your models. You'll get a lot of milage out of your textures, and honestly there isn't anything you haven't done thus far that couldn't be all vertex color. I'd research vertex chameleon, it's a great plug-in and allows you to easily darken verts and change hue/saturation of your model.
Good luck, keep going, I want to see some of those environments!