When designing a new character, you’ll want to have a goal in mind. A beautiful part of the workshop is that characters can exist with vastly different origins, goals, visuals, styles and game feel all under one engine.
If you know already how you want your character to play or you are trying to interpret gameplay elements that already exist in another game, then stay true to your original goals during the development process. It will make your life easier to have a north star to look toward in terms of design.
Once you are finished and have something playable, then you can begin experimenting and changing mechanics to see what feels the best. But it’s easy to get lost in the sauce if you iterate too early and don’t have a full picture too look at.
If you are making a new character and want them to fit into the existing Rivals world in terms of gameplay, there are a few guidelines that can help you.
Archetypes
The first is that you should have a character archetype in mind from the beginning. This can be your north star even if the character is original and doesn’t pull from something that exists. A character archetype can be very specific or fairly broad but generally captures how an average player would boil down your character in a single word or phrase. Archetypes in Rivals of Aether II include Rushdown, Zoner, Grappler, Heavy, Floaty, Spacie, Item Wielder, and more. Archetypes can also be gameplay styles from other games that haven’t been in Rivals II yet like Puppets or Duo or even archetypes from other genres like Supports or Snipers. This archetype is something to lean back on when you have questions and aren’t sure what a number should be or how an attack should feel.
Animation
The next guideline is that animation and design are delicately linked when it comes to a fighting game. You can have stylization in your artistic direction but you need good key poses to have a character read no matter who they are.
One way to make your life easier is to animate your whole character with “gameplay” quality animations before you go back through and animate “final” quality animations. Gameplay animations are not quite stepped animations as you can use interpolation, but they are very similar to stepped animations in terms of workload. Your goal is to make very clear and expressive key poses at all the important parts of the animation. Your startup should have an early important keyframe that feels different from idle so you know you are about to attack and which direction the attack is headed. Your active should probably be all hand touched keyframes since you want to control where each hitbox lies. Then your recovery should have two important keyframes. One right after getting out of the active and another near the end of the recovery that shows the character is still unable to move (for example stays hunched up). That way players don’t think the attack is over because the character is too close to their idle animation during the recovery interpolation.
Gameplay
The last guideline for design is that gameplay is king. Your ideas and your design documents help you create the base, but a character is only fun if they are fun to play. You’ll want to make use of gameplay quality animations and temporary sfx and vfx to get a playable character as quickly as you can. Then once you have it, you need to play it. Play with anyone who will play with you – people better than you, people worse than you. Ask them what they think. Take notes. Figure out what is confusing. Be willing to be surprised by what is working and don’t be stubborn about what is not working. Sometimes a character changes a lot after it’s playable and that’s okay – Etalus wasn’t meant to be so rushdown in Rivals 1. Other times you might want to push a character back to your original goal because its new style will become too hard to balance. And that’s okay too! The most important part is that the character is fun to play for both you AND other people! So get feedback and iterate. And try to get to the point where you can play someone as quickly as you can. You’d be surprise by how fast development goes after that point.
Visuals
Face & Expression
Our characters lean slightly toward an anime/toon-inspired style rather than realistic proportions.
- Most characters have eyebrows to help communicate expressions clearly.
- Eyes should be larger and more expressive than realistic animal eyes.
- Eyes should face forward like a human’s, while still maintaining enough depth to read properly from side views like an animals.
- Keep the mouth in a neutral pose before rigging. This makes it much easier to create a full range of expressions later.
Starting with a default smile or frown can make other expressions more difficult to achieve.
Silhouette & Shape Language
Strong silhouettes help characters remain recognizable at a glance.
- Use stray hairs, feathers, spikes, and other protruding shapes to break up the outline of the head and body.
- Our characters often have spikier hair tufts and shape accents that help create a more interesting silhouette.
- Focus on creating readable shapes before adding small details.
Anatomy
Keep anatomy present, but simplified.
- Muscles should help define body structure and indicate form.
- Avoid over-defining musculature, as it can quickly push the character into an uncanny or overly realistic appearance.
- Hands and feet tend to be bigger and visually separated from the rest of their body to ensure legibility, this is important for any aspect of your character that is used for attacks.
Simpler anatomy generally fits our style better than heavily rendered muscle groups.
Clothing
When working with clothing details, less is usually more.
- Avoid overdoing wrinkles and folds.
- Since clothing is constantly moving during animation, excessive wrinkles can appear strange or distracting during certain poses.Limit wrinkles to key compression and tension areas:
- Knees and Elbows
- Base of the thighs
- Base of the arms
Areas where clothing bunches up, such as rolled sleeves, tucked shirts, or gathered fabric
Stylized Animals
If you are stylizing an animal, you don’t need to replicate every detail perfectly. Focus on the features that make the animal instantly recognizable and emphasize those.
- Prioritize defining traits, such as unique horn shapes, fur patterns, feathers, ears, etc.
- Approximate real-world anatomy rather than copying it exactly.
- Aim for a balance between animal and character design rather than realism.
If you try to get every little detail in you could end up in an uncanny situation where it looks like you placed a realistic animal head on a human body, or vice versa.
Designing for Game View
Always keep the in-game camera distance in mind.
- Favor larger, simpler details over small, intricate ones.
- If a character is wearing sneakers, for example, avoid modeling 5–7 individual shoelace strands.
- At gameplay distance, these details become visual noise. Simplifying the laces to 3–4 larger shapes makes them easier to read and saves unnecessary work.
- Regularly check your design and silhouettes from a 3/4 view, as this is how characters will typically be seen in-game.
- If a detail cannot be clearly read from gameplay distance, consider simplifying or removing it.
- Animate to the camera, although poses should read okay from all angles, your poses should look best from game view, often this means turning them slightly towards the camera instead of directly facing the opponent.
- Consider the character’s intended weight and and how this affects their movement.
- Consider their personality and how that impacts the way they move through the world, much of a character’s personality is sold through their animation.
- Spend the time to get a great Idle pose because all states will need to return to it, and it does a lot of the heavy lifting in selling the personality and attitude, which should also tie into their play style and mechanics.
Modeling Process
- Establish large forms first and work out proportions before getting into details, this will help you more easily make major adjustments early on while you’re still figuring things out.
- Make a simple block in of your character early on to help establish the big shapes and prevent overdetailing. It’s very easy to get carried away with unnecessary detail.
- Consider roughly rigging your Block in and checking it out in game before committing to sculpting, texturing etc.
- Establish the scale of your character as soon as possible. It will help a ton with getting their proportions locked in ROA2
- While working on the character zoom out often to see how things read. Switch your viewport lighting to Flat to get a read on the silhouette
- ROA2 Characters tend to have larger heads and eyes for readability. Try to make sure your character don’t have tiny heads or they might look like they come from a different universe next to other characters.
- While working on your character consider Importing in an existing ROA2 character similiar in scale to the character you are making and have them off to the side.