Reebo Concept Art:

We went through many Reebo character iterations and we finally found the one that we were looking for. There were many attempts to create the perfect balance of communicating his design whether it be his height or thickness in his chubby looks or how slim his arms should be. We feel like we found a perfect balance between the designs we went for and we are happy to finally share it!

Moving on onto the next weeks we started focusing on a new design for Reebo as its previous look didn’t give much the impression of being a rubber, but more of a small robot. Doing some research on pencil rubbers (yes, we did research on that) we thought we still wanted to have Reebo being colored, and not just try to replicate the classic white rubber. Then, which rubber is the most common after the classic white one? The blu/purple one, with a white stripe around the perimeter. Downloaded an image of the rubber, and we started right away sketching some new concepts for our freshly rubbery Reebo design. 

Once the new design was ready we started right away rebinding the skeleton in Maya to the new model, creating new seamless animations, and creating new textures for it. But here is when we started facing a lot of problems, between UE, Maya, and Substance Painter. (SP)

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New:

Reebo Final 3D Model:

Our team has finally 3D Modeled the new refreshed Reebo character with its final textures! We are excited to share with you all the progress of it! We can not wait to start rigging and animating it with new refined animations! 

Reebo Rig:

We have finally rigged the New Reebo Character and we are excited to bring this character to life!

Tech Discussion:

This rig is much more refined than the previous rigged Reebo. It has fully functional movements for the IK handles and weight painting has seemingly majorly improved hip movements that affect the legs giving the animators much more realistic and creative freedom with the dynamics of the new rig.

Reebo Texturing:

We've run into some issues with adding Reebo's final textures. Our textures are created by importing a Maya model, painted in Substance Painter, and then exporting those textures into Unreal Engine. It seems the model UV's changed along the way and no more extended match model to textures. We've tried multiple settings to try and get it to work however we may have to start from the beginning if we can not find a solution. 

<< GENERAL DISCUSSION >>

Getting Reebo's final polished look wasn't easy. It took a lot of iteration and time to achieve what we have today. In the first few weeks, we realized how important it is for platformer games to have good character movement before anything else. Therefore we had to focus on improving Reebo on a lot of things. First, we started adjusting the gravity force and physics in the world and then the character movement. As soon as we started playing with some of the values in UE4, we noticed some improvement in how the player could handle Reebo in-game, and the feeling our play tester gave us got a decent FB. 

All our problems didn’t disappear as we hoped. When the time came to apply the new textures to the model we realized that something went wrong along the way, and all the textures were all over the place. After analyzing all the steps we’ve taken we noticed that when we changed the model we totally forgot to re-UV our mesh, so when we imported the model in SP for texturing, the software made his own UVs for the model, and of course, they wouldn’t match anymore with the one in UE. Creating the issue.

Since we really wanted to make a good job with the character we decided to take our time with it and do a proper rework on it. In Maya we mirrored Reebo sides, UVed the model, assigned only 3 materials, for limbs, body, and eyes, and we also had to rebind the mesh to the skeleton and redo the skin weights too. Having a much more clean geometry allowed us for the UVing process to be a bit faster and the final results were very clean. 

With this done, we repeated the whole process of texturing and importing skeleton and mesh in UE for the third time, but as you know, the third time’s the charm. Finally, all of Reebo’s pieces started getting together, a sign of progress for the whole project, and a decent boost for the Nanotech team.  We really saw Reebo coming to life, he just needed some more work.

We began adding particle effects for the spin attack and double jump to add more life to his actions. We also created a glitch effect for when Reebo takes damage so that the player could realize when he was getting hit or damaged. We made this by the use of widgets and some animations technique in UE, of tweaking render opacity and location of the image.  

Along the way, in week 9, we felt like we were missing some mechanics because the only way the player could lose a life was by getting hit by enemies, which there were not many in the level. So, moving from here and after some research on platformer games, we concluded that adding falling damage with the loss of a full life could fix this hole in the game. We created a fairly complex system that calculates a difference in height, recording the last known location, starting height, and subtracting the final location, ending height. If the difference is greater than what we set, Reebo will take damage. Of course, this whole new system took weeks to get perfected and a lot of testing, but ended up making the game a whole new experience as the player has to be more careful of moving around the level, and careful not to fall from big heights or outside the bounds.

Now, having this new falling damage, caused the player to lose lots of lives. Making the level playable just by masters of platformers. With this, we felt like we had to rebuild a whole new health system and some collectibles that could give the players some lives back. For the new health system, we stuck to the initial and classic three hearts style, but with the opportunity to collect extra lives, with a max of five. Building this new system took almost three days and another week of perfecting it, so we can say it wasn’t easy to make it updated with HUD. But in the end, we got it working fine and that’s all that matters. So we had to figure out a way for the player to re-gain lives while progressing in the level. Since the beginning, we had these cute mushroom props all over the map, that some testers have mistaken for collectibles over and over. Then, why not? Why not make some of these mushrooms collectibles? Here we go, take one of the mushroom models and make this a collectible. Collect five and get all lives back plus one. Spread not too many around the map and the job is done. 

With these new mechanics and systems, the game started feeling much better and more complete. At this point, our character was 99% complete for the final release, just a few final touches and a lot of love. Reebo is coming!!