Thread by @Peggy_P_, Hey twitter,Tokotoko, the game I've been working on and off for the [...]

Hey twitter,
Tokotoko, the game I've been working on and off for the past year, is out in five (5) days o_o !

To celebrate the incoming release, I'm starting this thread about the artistic direction of the project o/

Here, one of the key arts of the game

Let's start with the reaaally early stuff. These were done around december 2018, back when I was still a freelancer for the studio, and served as a "technical test" to see what I envisioned for the character designs. The game was still a vague concept at that time

from there, we isolated a few characters we really liked and pushed the illustrations a bit further, to see what would be the basic "guidelines" of the art style

flash forward two months later, with the first 3d model, along with rendering tests. The albedo is done from sliding the UVS on a gradient texture (second picture), which makes it pretty quick and easy to manipulate.

The "clay" look was decided from the very start

Here you can see what the UVS look like on a gradient texture, and how it works. Oh, and meet Hako o/

By the way, this texturing workflow was greatly inspired by @minionsart 's "lazy unwrapping" tutorials, but we added our own twist to it (more in the following tweets)

and here comes the twist : we developped our own gradient textures generator in unity, which allows us to adjust the whole color scheme of the game in engine, without having to rely on an image editing software

this system also allows some neat stuff, such as dynamically blending between different color schemes (you can see how the texture evolves in the upper right corner), to create some day & night cycles, for instance. We ended up using it quite a lot

in the meantime, the characters were being fleshed out with backstories and a few inspirations (such as, real and/or fictional characters), here you can see the first and final pass of the character designs

the biggest evolution was Peko, the carp, cuz his sock-shaped body was kinda hard to read and a bit unpleasant to look at in 3d. Here's the old model :

... and here's the new one ! simpler, more appealing, and also fully rigged

also, his barbels are physically simulated, then baked into the animation. Funny little twist.

every facial expression is done with a combination of blendshapes, and the eyes and mouth can be either closed or opened by switching between several meshes

here you can see the meshes of the eyes being switched, from the "opened" version to the "closed" one. We ended up writing a custom script in unity that ensures that this transition happens instantly, with no interpolation (so that you dont ever notice the eyes changing size)

In the end, there are more than 250 separate animations in the game. quite a big scope for an AR game with characters that rarely take up more than one tenth of the screen.
Here's azuko doing a "bad guy laugh". I love animating him cuz he is so despicable

this one is a bit janky but overall I kinda like the acting, looks kinda cute

oniko is probably the most complicated character cuz of all the secondary animation on the coat and feathers. took me a while to figure out what to do with those features

Don't worry, I'm nearly done showing off animations. It was clearly my main occupation, cuz yeah, tokotoko is a narrative game with lots of interactions, and the list of animations kept expanding throughout the project

this little koala ghost is a goagoa. the second simplest rig of all, pretty quick and fun to animate ! I kept myself from publically showing him off since he has not yet been announced.
The design was an early take of Oniko the owl, that ended up being repurposed as an "ennemy"

last but not least, here is the grappling hook from episode 2 ! the rope is constrained to an animated bezier curve, which makes it very easy and fun to animate

Here, I'm done talking about character animation. Next up : FXs

the FX process was overall "relatively simple", the biggest twist being that all the particles are cutout instead of alpha blended. Since our game is in augmented reality, its pretty hard to predict what will serve as a background ; thus, alpha can look weird.

the one and only particles that are alpha blended are the standard unity particle (for cheap volumetric lights) and the trails.
This portal below is a combination of a 3d model with rotating uvs + animated blend shapes, an occluder, a force field and various particle effects.

particles are actually one hand painted greyscale, which allows for a nice fading effect by simply tweaking the opacity treshold over time. (I later discovered that they use a very similar technique in sea of thieves, for spreading vomit)

pretty sober (yet colorful) effects overall hehe ! It's nice to keep it simple

let's go on with game illustrations o/ all the colors are picked from the textures, for continuity. Those are the thumnails you see when you navigate the game's chapter screen

another set of illustrations : Azuko's self portraits, that are all inspired from famous paintings

speaking of illustration, Tokotoko has some well hidden achievements. each achievement has a small illustration, here are some of those :

second (and last) batch of illustrations ^^

Let's move on to promotional art o/ Here is the very first promotional art we did, from modeling clay. pretty clunky hahaha

fast forward to the most "iconic" key art. We went to some thrift shops and various other places to find cute little items. I kinda like the miniature easel, so convenient

The whole "small characters in photographic environments" vibe is kinda fun to do. Very inspired by Pikmin's promo arts

here's a second one. I asked a musician to come up with a "tab" that would make sense for the cello. took wayyy too much time. It was filmed 400 meters away from our studio

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