Making Action Game Minions Interesting, Part 1: The Art

There's a problem that all shooters encounter-- the problem of enemy frequency. By its nature, an action shooter requires shooting. Of "bad guys." And lots of them. To provide both swarms of enemies to fight and a constant stream of excitement, we try to infuse even the most common characters with personality, interesting (meaningful) behaviors and variety. That's what we're going for with the next enemy we're examining for our upcoming mobile shooter, Morning Star. For reasons that will become apparent, he's a studio favorite.

I recently examined a key enemy character from the game, the Dust Ascended. His journey from sketch to final character ranged across multiple designs but ended up being straightforward from a gameplay standpoint. The one we're introducing here was the opposite.  The enigmatic Mike Choi nailed the basics of the character in his first sketch (below), but we explored a ton of options as it relates to gameplay as we evolved the character's behavior in the game. This resulted in multiple classes and interesting variations of the character that will hopefully be fun for players of the game. His first public appearance (in the Morning Star Documentary Episode 3) was brief, so we're excited to explore his evolution here in depth.

Meet the Renfield.

We named him after the secondary antagonist in Bram Stoker's Dracula.  We took inspiration from Stoker's original creation, because this race of alien tinkerers was conquered by the malevolent Dust, and they did a Devil's deal-- rather than be destroyed completely, as the Dust usually does to its conquests, the Renfields became enslaved to their conquerors, providing them with shock troops and their own distinct brand of technological "help," which I'll explain below.

After coming up with some background and physical traits, we dove into concepting.

Morning Star Renfield Exploration2

Morning Star Renfield Exploration

Morning Star Renfield Concept1

Morning Star Renfield Concept

Morning Star Renfield Concept2

Morning Star Renfield Concept3

Morning Star Renfield Scale

Morning Star Renfield Trooper1

Morning Star Renfield Trooper2

Morning Star Renfield Trooper3

Morning Star Renfield Variants

Morning Star Renfield SMG

Morning Star Renfield SMG Turnaround

Morning Star Renfield Pose

We got the character into shape in 3D by greyboxing him up and applying some color to get a feel for how he would look and operate in the game...

Morning Star Renfield Final Turnaround

Morning Star Renfield Close Ups

Here's some closer-in details of his model elements before we applied the materials to make him come alive.

Morning Star Renfield Textured Poses

Morning Star Renfield Performance1

Morning Star Renfield Performance2

Lead Animator and Disney-freak, Aaron Marroquin, takes each character we make through performance pieces like this to get a sense of how he'll behave in the game-- how he moves, emotes, attacks and retreats. This guy's movements put him among our favorite characters in Morning Star-- he's both not-quite-serious, and not-quite-funny...

Morning Star Renfield Final Pose

And here he is, in all of his lit-and-textured glory, standing by to stop you from saving your friends, your family and anyone else you might think of trying to save. The AI behaviors we've designed for the Renfield and the rest of our enemies is another essential part of this story, and I'll share some learnings and results of that in a future post.