Good thing about animating with Spine is that we can put almost 50 different skins on the same-ish skeleton. If one can shrug, they all can shrug. As you can see here, everything is perfectly normal. Each of these characters has their own head, arm, leg, other arm… wait a minute, something seems off….
You might be wondering, why do they all have white gloves like Mickey mouse? Well…..
My eyes are up here
According to most artists, two of the hardest things to draw on a recognizable human are faces and hands. The characters pictured above have as many different things on their head (hair, nose, mouth, pupils etc) as they have on the rest of the body, so there was definitely a lot of work around faces. As for the hands, more sane developers would probably just put cartoonish closed fists and call it a day, but we decided to do A LOT with hands. You can see in the picture below some of them and that’s just the beginning. We are going to need a lot more white gloves to fit everything.
So, white gloves for everyone?
Obviously we don’t want to make Mickey mice out of everyone. But we can’t just paint everything in a basic skin color as there isn’t one. Cloak&Boffer features skin colors of many races, exposures to sunshine and body paints, so practically every character will require a personal color for the hands.
There are two ways to tackle this issue and we’re still choosing which one.
First one is keeping all the hands in a separate skin, just pinning it on character skins and applying tint to the hand slots. That’s easy for the animator, clumsy for the programmer, prone to bugs.
The more attractive option is adding each hand to each skin separately and tinting them beforehand, which is extra work for the animator, but characters just work out of the box. The biggest problem with this solution is that every time we add a new kind of hand, we must also apply it to every one of our 40+ skins in the game.
At this moment, we’ll probably just keep the separate white gloves and have skins with invisible hands. At least until the time comes for us to make some gameplay video materials.
Oh and many characters have different kinds of mouths. Don’t even get me started on that.
