Veil is a 3D platformer featuring horror elements and a highly mobile player. The player can jump over your typical ground-walking antagonist easily, making monster design tricky.
To solve this I designed a creature that can climb levels with ease to reach my players.
IF YOU WISH TO EXPERIENCE VEIL: ALTER UNKNOWN’S DEMO FRESH, SPOILERS AHEAD!
Climbing Logic
First I start with a character with spherical collision that can accelerate through space. Now it can get from point A to point B.
We need to know about the surrounding walls for later steps. Spherical traces are sent out in all directions to collect wall data.
If performance becomes a concern here, traces can be staggered across frames.
Using the wall data, the monster sucks itself towards surfaces (but also pushes away when too close)
The monster body orients itself to found surfaces to make for a base character rotation.
Feet are programmed as separate entities, taking turns shifting positions around monster to attach to walls. This is purely cosmetic.
I use the feet positions to drive an in-game IK control rig. With these ingredients, a wall crawling monster is born!
Navigation
Obviously ground-based nav meshes wont do for this creature. Instead I placed “breadcrumbs” in level for him to move towards and “eat” to find his way around. These can be placed on walls, ceilings, etc.
When chasing player, he simply moves towards her last seen position, resulting in navigating around corners.
It took some tweaking to make the monster work better
- If monster runs out of breadcrumbs to “eat”, he must be willing to eat them again.
- Monster chooses breadcrumbs that are close by and unobstructed.
- Monster also must be willing to give up on a crumb if he’s not having any luck reaching it
- When monster reaches breadcrumb, the next one is decided by line tracing between current and surrounding crumbs. Prevents odd situations where monster doesn’t quite see around a corner a breadcrumb is trying to navigate him around.
Character Design
Monster is heavily inspired by wendigos and animal skeletons. I wanted an unnerving form that exudes great power; something you wouldn’t want to upset.
His design comes not from concept art, but blocking out each portion until it felt right.
Monster has a purposefully confusing silhouette to make players ask “what is that!?” when spotted in the dark: three rear legs, split spine, and many spikes do the job.
To communicate the monster’s vison cone, a lit “visor” with a spotlight was added. It turns red to indicate when it sees player.
He also whispers to help player gauge his proximity.
For storytelling, face hints at a personality. I envisioned a character who can look bitter, laughing, or kind depending on the angle.
Peter Lantz 