Blobbie Evolution

It's no secret that we've been building this game for a long time. For over five years in fact. And during that time, we've had to learn loads of new things. One of those things was learn how to draw characters that were acceptable for Powargrid. Since I was well aware of my artistic limitations, I decided that the main characters would be blobbies. Blobbies with one eye to be exact, so drawing them (without taking forever) would lie within the realm of the possible for me. The first iterations of Commander Grak looked like this:

I was thinking along the lines of amoeba, and I also figured that I'd need variability in form to be able to convey emotions. But this didn't work well enough, so eventually we settled for a more defined (though not more solid) shape. Turns out that you can convey a lot of information about how a blobbie feels with just an eye, a mouth and an eyebrow.

​Once we got to that shape, I thought it was just a matter of drawing a picture for every dialogue node. How naive of me! Over time, as I drew hundreds of blobbie pictures, I actually got better at it. Or, to be more precise, I learned a couple of things. First off, we humans are really, really good at detecting where someone is looking. We notice the tiniest fractions when it comes to how the iris and pupil are placed compared to the white of an eye.
​I also found that dialogue pictures work best if the blobbie is looking straight at you, except when there is a good reason to look some place else. Down if they're ashamed or up if they're exasperated for instance. In the earlier pictures I made, I wasn't very precise in these placements, so it felt like the blobbies were telling you things without really being interested in you. And even though this would probably be in character for most of the blobbies you'll encounter in Powargrid, it works counter to drawing the player into the story. So this had to change.

Second, what I realised early on for the body shapes is something I didn't realise for the mouths and especially the eyes until a lot later. I purposely started out with eyes that weren't perfect spheres. That just didn't feel right for the blobbies. And that is still true. Using perfect spheres makes them lose a bit of their organic-ness. But making the shapes much smoother than I did looks much better. So the mouths and especially in the later drawings are better than in he earlier ones.
In all, the differences are subtle, until you look closely. Once you see it, the difference is glaringly obvious. Or perhaps I'm developing a rudimentary artist's eye ;). Some examples:

This was especially true for the first mission of the campaign; eventually it stood out to me like a sore thumb. And that mission is the first thing people see of the blobbies, and often of Powargrid (there are also people who dive straight into skirmish battles, but most play at least part of the campaign first). So this had to change. And today, finally, I got around to remaking those pictures. And I'm happy with the result! Here's the first thing you see when you start the first mission of the campaign:

I mean, I know I'm still no Michaelangelo, but that's part of the limitations I have to work with :). But the new Commander Grak image offers much more connection when you're reading the dialogues, and that's what I'm aiming for.

​And there is one more thing I'd like to share. We decided quite some time ago to separate the blobbies from the backgrounds. The reason for that was so that we could change the backgrounds without redoing all the pictures. And the backgrounds have become much better over time. In hindsight, we probably should have made the blobbies themselves modular as well. That way, we could have built up each blobbie from a base body shape, paraphernalia such as hats and decorations, an eye and a mouth. In which case I would have just had to improve the base ingredients and every blobbie picture would have become better. But as I said at the start of this post, we've had to learn a lot. Apparently this was one of the things on my list.

Happy gaming :)

-Willem-