Unity · Early days

Project: Wizard

A working title for a roguelike I'm building on the side. Unreleased, and nowhere near playable.

Where it's up to The art runs ahead of the game. The models and animations exist, and that is most of what there is so far. The game around them is still being built, and the demo is a long way off. Everything below is either a real asset in the project today, untextured and likely to change, or notes out of the design docs.

The world The setup The player is the fifteenth son of a Wizard King. Twelve older sisters, a queue of older brothers, and a father who has never had a reason to learn his name. On his island, magical bloodline is the only currency, and the magicless are what wizards practise on. So the plan is simple, and it came to him in a dream. Take the free island next door, where wizards and the magicless live side by side. His father's kingdom has never managed to touch it, and there will be no ignoring the son who does. He spends his last money on the passage and lands on the beach with a stick. The dream has not come back since.

Deaths Drowning The island is ringed by things that do not want you leaving it. Swim out far enough and something takes you. Each one rises out of the sand, takes the wizard, and drops back under.

Hands rise out of the seabed, take the wizard, and drop back under — Hands. One of the drowning deaths, animated in Blender.

Art Blender for the art, Unity for the game Sub-voxel is the closest name for it. Each creature is a handful of hard-edged boxes rather than a voxel grid, flat-shaded and untextured, and the camera sits wide and pulled back so a wolf pack closing from three directions stays legible. Everything in the world is modelled and animated in Blender, then brought into Unity, where the game itself is built. That covers the player, the creatures, and sixty-eight scenery pieces so far.

Blender with the Tentacles rig open, armature selected over the seabed and the drowning wizard — The Tentacles rig in Blender, mid-authoring

Bestiary Wolves and bears Two creature families are modelled and rigged so far. Each has a full set of clips: idle, walk, run, and the attacks below.

**Wolf run cycle** Wolves hunt in packs of three or four and roam rather than hold ground.

**Wolf lunge** Windup, lunge, recover. The whole tell a player has to read before it lands.

**Bear paw swipe** Bears are solitary and den near caves with two cubs. Not a fight you pick early.

**Bear slam** The heavy one. Slow enough to see coming, and slow enough to punish if you read it.

Under the hood What it's built with

UnityC#Blender

Waitlist Want to hear about it eventually?

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