[Background Blog] Bystanders

Today we’re talking about the bystanders.

As you should know, Nekojishi exists in our modern world. Although the main themes and plot of our game revolve around beastmen, gods, and spirits, the main characters are still human, so a world devoid of humans is strange, don’t you think?

Considering that the sequel would have a larger scale than Nekojishi, we decided that we were going to have to include some people to help the world feel natural. After all, you’d expect to see more than yaoguai and god beastmen, right?

Now let’s get into the meat of things with the designs for some of the bystanders.

These bystanders have no importance in the story, so we left our designer to be free to make whatever they want. For now, we’ve drafted three different designs to give us a little variety.

After this we start working on turning the designs into 3D models.

 …Adding some textures. 

 …And finally making some different colour and skin tone variations to have more visual distinctions between different bystanders.

Here’s the high school girl. She’s pretty detailed despite being someone who exists in the background, don’t you think?

Of course, we didn’t forget to give this girl some “friends”.

(Bob Ross voice) Just like that, we’ve got ourselves some lively and refreshing models of a group of high school girls. It’s that easy, isn’t it?

Aside from standard people you may see everyday, you’ll also find some special bystanders based on aspects of Taiwan culture and lifestyle:

“Here comes the street vendor lady! Move out the way if you’re not buyin’ anything!”

And at least, we also want to show some of the various combinations of different clothing available to our bystanders.

As you can see in the video, there’s only one base model that all the bystanders share. This serves two purposes; firstly, we can swap the models out and reuse the same animation set easier, and secondly, it allows us to save time and resources making so many different models. After all, the only purpose they serve is filling in details in the world.

But as you can imagine we can’t fill an entire world with guys with sweaters, high school girls, and street vendors. As the story progresses, we plan to introduce more bystanders where it makes sense to do so. We might even add more variety to them depending on the availability of additional resources.

By the way, you may notice that these characters don’t have any eyes. That’s because we have a different solution for faces using 2D geometry that you can only find in the game itself. We grabbed a friend of ours to demonstrate.

And that concludes our post about the bystanders in Carmacks. Although we really want to show more characters to you, we may end up spoiling plot details while doing so. So let’s save the beastmen for another day!

We hope that everyone has enjoyed this Patreon post. We’ve been hard at work on Carmacks these past few weeks, so we hope to be able to share a whole lot of stuff with everyone soon. 

- Studio Klondike