Character Construction

In this image we have 4 characters you will see in the game. There are many more than this, and I'll show them to you as time goes on. But you can see that these 4 character concepts share the same physical proportions and it's only their equipment that sets them apart from each other. This applies to the rest of the cast as well.

This was an entirely conscious desicion that serves multiple purposes. From a creative standpoint, I knew up front that I didn't want to spend any time writing a story or developing characters; Ultimately I know that people play beat-em-ups because they want to experience exciting combat...not to be a part of some nonsensical melodrama. None of the characters in Aztez will have a distinct face (though they will have facial expressions we will use as gameplay cues) and none of them will speak. I feel that in the context of a game like this, those things simply aren't important.

From a technical standpoint, it greatly narrows down the amount of character assets I have to manage. Every character you see in the game will be built on top of one base character model, and will simply have different equipment assets attached to them at key points to set them all apart. I will do character animations on one individual rig that any character can use since they're all essentially the same dude with different gear.

Knowing that the gear is the characterizing factor here made it easy to settle on a system like this and gave me that much more reason to push the form in this game. The ultimate challenge with these characters is making sure I can distinguish them all from each other when they all have the same body. The solution in this case is with distinct helmets attached to the head, distinct loincloths attached to the crotch, distinct jewelry attached to the arms, etc. So in the rig there are dummy objects at specific points that I can snap an object to in Unity and once the right combination of gear is attached I can smash it all into a prefab object. Bam! That's how a character is put together.