Flight Log #2: Avatars

Characters in any game are a complex endeavour and one of the appeals of making a flight sim was that we could avoid them entirely! No human character models to perfect, no uncanny valley where faces somehow never look ‘right’, no matter how much you tweak, and no need for a team of animators to bring complex characters to life. No, instead, we could simply have an aircraft comprised of multiple meshes that either remain static, continually spin around (think propellers and wheels), rotate between two specific angles (most other moving bits of an aircraft!) or, in the case of some of the Deadstick team’s recent playthroughs - fall off entirely!

Whilst the focus in Deadstick is on being the pilot not the aircraft, playing in first-person means you don’t need to see your character - the pilot is literally you, playing through the screen and mastering your skills as a bush pilot - that is, until you introduce multiplayer!

Multiplayer with other aircraft is all well and good, but the beauty of Deadstick is being able to get out and walk around. Without avatars, and the ability to see one another, you cannot truly share that experience.

Those of you that came to see us at Cosford and had the chance to experience the multiplayer, will be more than familiar with our little red capsule characters. At the time, these were our solution (read, "hack") to representing the player character to others. These capsules had a certain simple charm to them and after all of the positivity generated from Cosford, we knew we needed a way to be able to introduce some form of avatar into the sim but without all of the complexity that comes with full human characters.

After much discussion, considering various different simplified and stylised humanoid options, it quickly became apparent however, that by adding realistic human avatars, we could do so much more to convey/express what players are up to, that it became inevitable that we would have to tackle the challenge head on!

The Traditional Approach

As with all such things, it is often simplest to look at what others do when trying to solve such a problem and copy it. So we set off on a path to author a prototype humanoid character, get him rigged and set up with a few standard walk, run, and jump animations, and then sync his position with other players over multiplayer.

So just what goes into choosing a model for you, the player to be?

Firstly, we wanted to find one that could be used more-or-less off the shelf. We are a small team and, whilst we are lucky enough to have several very talented Vehicle and Environment Artists, character creation is a fairly specialised skill and models can often take months to develop from scratch. What's more, when designing anything new, there is always the challenge of trying to transfer a particular design/idea from one's own mind's eye to something that can be captured in a design brief and correctly interpreted by an Artist (I'm sure this is a problem any Police Sketch/e-Fit Artists can relate to!). It is by no means an impossible task, but one which usually requires several rounds of iteration before both parties can share the same mental picture.

So, we set about scouring the internet, to find a base model from which we could work. Much like the app store for playing games, these days there are several online marketplaces available to purchase assets which can be used in both film and