Topdown Action RPG/Adventure game characters (think Zelda style/Legend of Mana)

Cortes

Feel free to crit any and all things I post in this thread. Actually please do! lol

Hi guys. I am trying my hand at making a (zelda style overhead adventure) game in Unity and am working on a main heroine character. Texture is about over 50% finished besides obvious cleanup issues (bit sloppy atm) and the gray areas, keeping it nice cartoony and simple palettes with a kind of cel shaded style (if you're on Sketchfab check out a guy called Garm, who has absolutely gorgeous models in that style). Which tri count would work better? She will wield a weapon, so I decided to add a bit more topology to her model, mainly in the fingers and wrists, so would it be better to roll with that extra few hundred tris? I know it's not hardcore sub 1000 but I don't care lol, and Unity can handle this size for the main character anyway. What do you think? Left count (the left one was screencapped before I triangulated it so the full triangulated count is 1448) or right count?

model



also a silly pose in Mixamo (I will probably re rig it myself but Mixamo is helpful to test it out anyway ya know?)

Cortes

Here's an older draft of a character at 1320 tris. I will keep this mesh around as an NPC character and clean up the textures. The majority of combat will be against creatures with lower polycounts than these characters though, and it's possible I'll need to lower it even more if I want bipedal enemies like this.



an alternate color scheme for this mesh:



have a gif too (stock mixamo animation to test topology and deformation)

Asura

I like the style you are going for! One tip to help with a top down game is that when texturing you can use a top lighting overlay to make the head and shoulders stand out a bit more. It will make your characters more visible from a birds eye view.  

Cortes

Asura said:

I like the style you are going for! One tip to help with a top down game is that when texturing you can use a top lighting overlay to make the head and shoulders stand out a bit more. It will make your characters more visible from a birds eye view.  

Ooh, nice tip.  Any advice on the polycount (hehe, no pun intended)? Maybe I'm overthinking and can afford 1500+ meshes for the main character and bosses/major NPCs right? I'm thinking I'll stick to -1500 meshes for simple enemies and NPCs and whatever will be on screen the most in gameplay. low poly is fun, but also hard o_O

Cortes

taking a stab at landscape elements and an estimate of the gameplay camera