We're so excited to bring Camp Spirit to Steam! If the world is feeling overwhelming right now (understandably...) this game is a beautiful space to spend an hour a day to let your mind rest a bit. Also, look at @yuemi22.bsky.social's gorgeous art. 🤩

#IndieGameDev #Steam

a banner showing the key art for the games Cozy Grove and Pieced Together. to the left, the Cozy Grove key art shows a small human and a large bear sitting at a campfire together in front of a tent. to the right, the Pieced Together key art shows two women holding dinosaur plushies and smiling together in a photograph.

our friends over at @glowfroggames.bsky.social just launched Pieced Together, a cozy scrapbooking game where you decorate your scrapbook as you uncover parts of the story. 🧡

+ you can grab Pieced Together in a bundle with Cozy Grove for 10% off both titles. 🐻

store.steampowered.com/bundle/69550...

I just think it's cool and fun to work on 😄 We can offer a lot of variation for player customization - in this case, for throwing rad cave raves with glow sticks and neon. Dream fulfilled.🤘 (Screenshot below was shared by a player in the Spirit Crossing Discord channel for showing off fashion!)

It's a small chunk of nodes in the parent material, where the alpha of the LUT texture plugs into the one minus lerped with the emissive output of our custom lighting function that also gets the hue of that color parameter.

The shader knows whether something should glow based on the Alpha channel. If Alpha = 1.0, then no glow. If Alpha = 0.0, it glows. Some dyes glow and some don't. You've only swapped out the lut texture.

The reason I'm nerding out about this is because our color parameters get turned into LUTs (look up tables). Very cool tooling from one of our engineers makes this automatic. Then, our dyes are just a single texture getting swapped out on the material.

The red vertex color value we've designated as "Metal" always gets the metallic shader effects. "Primary" is always the biggest swath of color. Etc. Now clothes have a designated "emissive" slot too! Standards help decide what color goes where on a mesh, so color swaps have predictable results.

Clothing meshes use vertex colors for different color parameter slots that dyes affect. We use vertex colors all over for dyeing, color swapping, designating modular character slots, etc. Vertex colors are incredibly useful! I helped lead the set up for the design and art tooling. For example...

A cool thing we added to Spirit Crossing recently is ✨emissive clothing ✨! All in game clothing is dye-able (with the exception of a few very special items), but there's a set of Mythic dyes that give your outfit glowing neon details and it's been really fun to see players be creative with it!

I'm super curious - do you have different strategies for hair? Different strategies for secondary motion? I want to see all of the juicy secondary motion clips :D

It requires dynamic elements to be skinned to bone chains, with pretty decent control for setting limits on the rotation of the bones. For performance, it's easy to LOD out or bypass dynamics in quality settings or on specific character ABP's as needed.

I personally like using it for hair (or any dangling or floating elements, really, is quite fun) - it allows for dynamic secondary motion, saving time for animators and also reacting to procedural systems, like the hair of this spirit that's following the position of the player.

Looking to achieve the ultimate sassy hair flip?

✨Enter: Anim dynamics ✨

#Art #CharacterArt #GameDev #SpiritCrossing

🥦I live by the rule that geometry should be influencing the form in some way or there for deformation. If edge loops are arbitrary, target weld them down. Geometry isn't usually the biggest bottleneck/concern if you remember your foundations and keep within a decided vert count.

This is a simple one! There's flashier stuff to show, but sometimes you must eat your vegetables.🥦 For characters, a solid foundation includes clean edge flow and understanding how you want it to deform. This is my fav method for joints (from Spirit Crossing character documentation).

A 4x4 table where each grid of the table has a photo of an eye expression labeled with the coordinates of the corresponding UV offset in Unreal.

In documentation, I create a table for each texture on each character to help animation see the options. It's not always 4x4, might be 6x6, etc. depending on the needs of the character. Combining eyes+mouths gets more variation than you'd think from a 4x4. (+ we don't need viseme shapes on players)

Spirit Crossing | Patch Notes for Version 14.7 Greetings, wanderers! Spry Fox is turning 16 years old today! 🥳And we have even more reason to celebrate, with the release of the 14.7 update that brings with it balancing changes to waystation tre…

Spirit Crossing 14.7 is now live! 🧡

we've got..
🌳 big tree changes
🏙️ new decor and hairstyles
🚂 fluffalo train ride boosts
🎨 art changes & improvements
+ requested Quality of Life updates!

available now on Android and iOS (via Testflight)

+ more details here. ↓
spryfox.com/spirit-cross...

a screenshot from the game Spirit Crossing by the studio Spry Fox. the screenshot takes place inside a teahouse owned by a character named Marj who is standing behind a counter. four player-characters look at her from the other side of the counter, one holding their head in confusion with a question mark in a thought bubble.

we now have a subreddit for Spirit Crossing!

this is a great place to share longer videos, write expressive fan lore, ask the community questions, or discuss the large knife strapped to Marj's back that you all discovered using camera mode.

just normal stuff.

reddit.com/r/SpiritCrossing/

(The real kicker is that Unreal and Maya see 0,0 as different locations on the UV grid, so the texture coordinate numbers in Maya on the texture sheet are always reversed on the V axis, but the attribute buttons and values on the bones match what Unreal wants.🙃Ridiculous lol)

If you're curious, here's what the custom attributes look like in Maya. The attribute changes the UV values of the texture sheet, but also adds the values to the bones when keyframed so it gets included in the FBX export.

Making players for a mobile MMO means performance is top of mind! 100 players at a dance party cannot require loading hundreds of face textures, so face textures are shared, loading the same ones for everyone. There are always trade-offs and choices to make in this regard!

And players have a choice of different textures to add to their face, like blush, freckles, age lines, etc. NPC's use similar textures to communicate story (are they older? sick? tired?) They all have subtle shadows on their noses, which is purely a stylistic choice!

Faces have all kinds of small details, like texture sheets next to modeled eyebrows that add creases and furrows to let us push expressions further. Angry *feels* more angry with the extra tension lines. 😡

👁️👄👁️ Eyes and mouths are on individual geometry planes skinned to eye/mouth bones, allowing animators to translate/scale (and squash/stretch) face elements for more expression. Our characters are emotive and cartoony in ways that we also accentuate with VFX!

The faces themselves are 2D texture grids that get keyframed using custom attributes on the rig that change the UV coordinate values of the texture. The values export on face bones and become curves in each animation in UE5 that changes the corresponding parameter in the material instance.

...but still iterated on each expression and the exact style over time. It reminds me of this page from Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics". This wasn't *why* we chose dot-eyes, but we do hope our players can see themselves in the avatar they create and stylization can help w/ inclusive design.

As promised: Faces! 😁 Here's a thread about some technical details for how stylized faces get made in Spirit Crossing. 🧵

The game is inspired by media like Ghibli and BotW, but our faces are unique. There was lots of early discussion about face style & we landed on dot-eyes early...

Tami is an ✨amazing✨ producer - she is going to be sorely missed at Spry Fox. I cannot recommend her highly enough.

Yes! All of our shaders are custom and made in Unreal.

Thanks! ☺️