Hello everyone,
I was internally debating showing this since it’s not complete and I didn’t want it forming everyone’s first impressions, but this is the result of the work I’ve started recently on the base female model. While I feel there is still a lot to improve before I move onto texturing and rigging, I’m generally quite pleased with the level of detail despite it being my first attempt at modelling a semi-realistic humanoid. I posted this primarily because I feel it’s important to get as much feedback as possible at this stage, so please feel free to suggest things which you feel could be improved about this model. There is also progress being made on a second location, the protagonist’s home, by one of my main contributors, and it will soon be adapted for usage within the game. This part should be particularly interesting because we are planning to allow some degree of player customisation for this location, changing furniture arrangements, ect. I’m also experimenting with ways in which the engine can be optimized. I’ve brought in and updated some SIMD code another person had started working on a while back, and have made changes to the engine for the memory alignment required by such code. As of yet, this is still highly early and experimental, and while some minor improvements have come out of these experiments, I’ve yet to get the substantial performance improvements needed, but I’m sure that further research will lead to significant improvements in this area. Usually I would consider optimization something for much later in the project, but the fact is, even with the early static assets we already have, the game is already hitting unacceptable framerates, and solving this issue will be required before I can even consider putting out any kind of playable build.
Anyway, it seems odd to neglect showing off characters as part of the game’s initial concept considering that it is fundamentally what the game is about, so for now, I thought I would share some very early concept sketches. Some of these were done by me, and I personally have no pretence of being a legitimate 2D artist, but I hope that they might at least give some insight into the direction I’m hoping to take the game character-wise. There are also some additional sketches generously done by someone who is already contributing to 3D assets, Arno, but as of yet, we would still appreciate the help of a more experienced dedicated 2D artist.
I know this update is kind of shallow, but I’m going to post a follow-up post very soon when I feel the character model is ready. This post may also be updated if some new sketches are done, but for me personally, I’m not planning on doing any more character sketches for a while.
Galatea Project Development Blog 
Keep up the good work, Saracen-San!
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Thank you.
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I’m very pleased to see that there’s a good progression !
Keep up the good work and good luck ! 🙂
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Thanks, I’ll do my best.
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I’m so excited! Love the sketches and will be doing some fan-art now ^^
I don’t think I will be showing them till all the characters are shown in sketches though.
I have a couple of weeks left of complete free time so I may do some fan-fiction and come up with my own vision on how the characters may act.
Keep up the great work! I can’t wait for more >.<
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I’ll look forward to seeing what you come up with. There was an intention to try and communicate what these characters were about purely from their look (the two at the top probably communicating this most so far), but I would be interested to see if the designs did evoke similar interpretations of these characters in other people before even a single line of dialogue has been revealed. It would at least show that they’re doing their intended job.
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@Saracen
Is there an email I can contact you so we can chat about Godot engine itself? I’m still studying options for my project and it would be nice to have someone with a larger-scale project to share experiences. Are you on the facebook group for Godot?
By the way, the latest versions of godot have a heap of good stuff, you may want to check that out and see how it integrates with your changes (and maybe send pull requests? :P)
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There is an email address you can contact me from on the about page. As of yet, no, I don’t have any direct involvement in the Godot community, but I keep meaning to do so. I would actually like to get more directly involved in evolving the engine, since this is probably the most demanding 3D game anyone has attempted with it so far. I actually have my own Github page (https://github.com/SaracenOne/godot) and fork which is being updated from the latests builds, so I’ve been able to see some of the newer features like live editing first hand. I do intend to send pull requests, but some of the features in my fork are a bit esotertic, and would probably require me to actually sit down and discuss with the maintainer as to my reasoning to why they should be added to the mainline. There’s actually a bunch of more radical changes I would like to bring to the engine, but again, I’m kind of afraid of going too out of sync with the mainline at this point.
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That’s really cool ! You’re doing an amazing job over there Saracen ! Just keep up the good work 😉
By the way, while reading the comments I noticed that you have a Github page (related to the Galatea project ?). Therefore it would be nice if you put the link in the about page, so interested people could see how’s the project is going throught their own computer 😉
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Thank you! The Github page is only for my fork of the Godot engine which includes some bugfixes and new features not avaliable the mainline branch; it doesn’t include anything specific to the game itself like gameplay scripts and assets, so I just didn’t think it would be of interest to the majority of people here, only other engine programmers. It’s also not what I would consider an accurate reflection of the amount of effort going into the project, since it only includes engine modifications which are a small part of the project as a whole, but I’ll consider putting a link there anyway. However, as I hinted in the other comment, there’s some more radical engine changes which I would be interested in doing such as modifying the material system to support multipass shaders, or exposing the depth buffer for to allow usermade postprocessing shaders and by extension, procedurally generated skyboxes for dynamic time of day. I’m also discussing the possibility of implementing a procedural tree generator which I imagine would be useful for a lot of people.
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I think the sketches kinda look deviantart-ish andunprofessionalbut hey! not too shabby! Not like i can anime like that anyway. Something in the model seem off, like, the arms or something, but it all looks good regardless- everything sems to be falling into place! Kudos to the grat work, seems like it’ll be a great game.
Anyway, do you think you’ll post builds fot testing,like YandereDev did, or we’ll only be able to play in the final version?
I’m looking forward for all the progress you’re making!
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Yeah, I’m not surprised, since a lot of these were literally just made out of necessity for designing the model and I personally have not pretence of being a legitimate 2D artist (I literally learned the basics of anatomy just to draw some of these and haven’t sketched in years), and although I did put out the call, only one other person stepped up to offer help in this area and I didn’t feel their quality met the required bar. I’m actually quite disappointed by the fact that no one else has stepped up to this since I know there’s no shortage of talented 2D artists out there, and this is a project where the ability to convey appealing character designs would really shine considering it’s the core focus of the game. Don’t worry, I’ll definitely be looking into the arms amongst other things; there’s still a lot of tweaking I want to do with this model.
There will indeed be playable builds since I do feel that given the amount of balancing which will likely be required in a game like this, getting people’s feedback would be basically required to make this the game I imagine people want to play. However, as I mentioned in the post, there won’t be any builds released until the performance issues are at least sorted out, but we’re getting there now since it seems to have more to do with the layout of the scenes themselves rather than the renderer. There’s also an influx of new 3D art assets inbound covering locations beyond the school, so this should be fairly exciting.
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Oh, if you still need 2d artists, i can make an attempt- though my material (Such as cameras) isn’t the best, haha.
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You’re quite welcome to give it a shot. If you want to show me what you can do, maybe you could send me some examples via email.
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Just thought I’d provide some feedback on the model/sketches.
I wouldn’t consider myself an “experienced dedicated 2D artist,” but I draw anime/manga characters often as a hobby. Your sketches are great for showing off the character personalities, because I totally get the feel for each of them by looking at them. The only thing that really bothers me are the proportions: the proportions are a bit off and it affects how I perceive the characters. That’s not really a big deal though, as long as those proportions don’t carry themselves over into the 3D model.
As for the 3D model, it’s pretty good in terms of aesthetic and proportions. The arms are a bit off though; they should taper similarly to what you did with the legs. Typically you taper the upper arm to the elbow, then the lower arm widens at the elbow and tapers again to the wrist. The taper to the elbow can be slight, but the taper to the wrist is usually kinda dramatic in order to show the hand more clearly (otherwise the hand just looks like the end of the arm, without a palm.) You can see this in pretty much any anime/manga drawing and in MMD models. (Also, the hands that you currently have look really flat.)
I’d just like to say though, it’s highly possible that everything I’ve said is already in the model, and I just can’t tell because of the angles in the image. And it’s also possible that you’ve chosen to do/omit certain things in order to keep the poly count low.
But anyways, good job so far! I’m really excited to see how this game turns out. I might send some fanart if I can find the time.
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Thank you, this is exactly the kind of feedback I’ve been looking for; it gets a lot harder to change these things when moving onto the rigging and texturing stage. You’re actually completely valid about the points you made; at the time this was uploaded, the arms and hands were probably the aspects which had the least amount of attention, so recently I have attempted to give more of a sense of tapering to the elbows, as well as adding more polygon density around those areas which should help animation. I’ve also started improving the hands too, making them generally larger, less flat, and more distinct now. I may upload some new pictures of the model soon, showing it off from new angles and helping people to get a better look at the proportions. While I don’t quite feel ready to commit to texturing and rigging yet, I would like to take a shot at modelling some clothes next.
Personally, if you make any artwork, I’d love to see it.
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Looks like a start! You might be needing hordes of e-mails flooding your inbox to get the volunteers you need to get all this reference put in action! Don’t feel too bad about the limited interest right now, if Yanderedev’s situation is any indication, it is very much a curse and blessing to be noticed.
I was wondering what kind programming language Yandere Simulator is written in (best guess is C#). I ask because I only recently got into Unity and seems to me that Java [programming language I know best] isn’t all that popular for it, as in not supported.
I’d ask Yanderedev but he seems like he is at the point responding to questions like that would cause his house of cards to fall [his sanity, not the project].
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Generally, I don’t think a choice in programming language matters as much as people make it out, especially for games considering the way in which games are programmed nowadays, unless you were do something wildly unconventional like to write a game in a functional programming language like Lisp or Haskell which would introduce a massive paradigm shift. In Unity I’d say it matters even less since they all go through a similar VM, but since you asked, YandereDev favours Unity’s implementation JavaScript called UnityScript (which is actually completely distinct from regular Java, confusing I know), but I would consider going with C# since the architecture of engine somehow feels more suited the design of the language when it comes to classes in my opinion.
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That actually look nice ! But i feel like there is something wrong with the shape of the head. Also the eyelids seems misplaced 🙂 . Do your best, i think that’s really a promising concept !(In fact, i’m arleady sure that i’ll buy if i have enough and if that’s not too expensive)
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Yeah, you’re definitely right about the eyes, and they haven’t had much attention either. Head shape is something I’ve been trying on and off to get it right, but to no avail. I’m hoping that maybe with hair added, it won’t be as noticeable, but I’ll still continue to tweak it in an attempt to make it better. Thanks for you enthusiasm by the way, but I honestly wouldn’t feel comfortable accepting money from people at this stage.
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That’s not what i meant, i was talking about buying the game when it will be finished 🙂 .
I suggest you trying (or looking on youtube) for the game “Akiba’s Trip : Undead & Undreassed” since it features many anime characters models that you could see, which would probably help you a bit about how your model should be (i don’t say that you must copy everything, but only to “inspire yourself”). We usually know how something should be when we saw it a lot 😉 !
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Ah yes, I have actually tried Akiba’s Trip, and I actually find it a very good example of how you make something aesthetically pleasing in this style with fairly restrained resources. The main issue with Akiba’s Trip’s model I’ve found is that they’re probably a little too low detailed for what I’m trying to do, particularly when it comes to facial animation. All the dialogue scenes in that game are done sprite representations of characters, whereas I want to have the characters viewed in their original 3D models up close to the camera. That being said, the broader ‘look’ of something like Akiba’s Trip would be something I’d be happy to adopt for Galatea.
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Aahh and another tip, a year ago, i remember watching https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvgIVNDU-Dxjb3eukDF5W0l0-6ShO9OiM to experience myself. I didn’t watched them all, but he gives useful tips about modeling, and i think there is an entire video with tips about the head.. why not looking to it when you don’t do anything 🙂
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Thank you for that. That actually looks to be really useful; I’ll be sure to watch that and see if I can pick up on ways my model can be improved.
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The headshape is pretty good in the render. The eyebrows however, are pretty high. The chest looks pretty natural, just don’t make them look like huge over-inflated beach balls. Nice job!
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Thanks for the feedback. I’ve now adjusted the eyebrows to a more sane position and I’m going to upload an updated picture of the adjustments which have been made based on people’s advice here in a moment. Incidentally, the breasts were originally much larger as you can probably see from the concept art, but they’ve been scaled back a bit to a more average size. Those and other body proportions may actually be adjusted via a procedural character rig.
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