MagicCraft Character and Weapon Customization Stages

MagicCraft Character and Weapon Customization Stages

Character customization is one of the most interesting parts of the production. Here at Devoted  Studios, we are very proud of our projects and the opportunities we have to support them with beautiful characters.  And we would like to share some notes about the production process we made while working on MagicCraft, one of our recent projects.

Customization Stages

Before we actually got to 3D modeling, we started with creating 2D concepts to customize characters and weapons. The customization of characters includes two main levels.

Customization Level 1

The first level of customization is focused on the basic parts like colors and patterns, this stage is the early exploration of character looks. In the example you can see our basic character design and some of the pattern variations that we have explored. So this first level will include four different color palettes and two additional patterns as well.

Customization Level 2

In the second level of customization we include the actual new armor design. This is the example for Guild Wars II: as you can see, it's basically like different tiers and various kinds of upgradable armor. The new armor set will be based on certain topics or dedicated to a certain event. So the second level is actually a completely new armor set or a new tier that the players would desire to get.

Examples of MagicCraft Characters at an Early Stage of Production Stage

These are a little bit more in-depth examples of what we have created at the very early stage. This is basically the first level of the initial design: the color palette examples and some of the patterns. When we were creating these designs we try to emphasize some of the accent colors and keep the overall palette consistent, so the character looks cool.

Weapon Customization

We also performed some weapon customization for this project. For the weapon customization, we had a little bit more room for creativity.  The examples represent the early exploration of how we can actually proceed with weapons. Here we also take two levels of customization, almost the same as for characters. The first one includes colors and decor, but also different ideas and topics.

For example, the basic version of an axe can be rusty, silver, and have some runes, or the more advanced one can have fireballs and poisoned rune packs. 

These are the six basic weapons that we had in the first MVP, some of the ideas that game designers came up with.

3D Customization

Basically what we have here are a lot of variations that can be done with the same geometry and silhouette of the character. So basically if we change the color, the patterns, and some details, we can have a lot of different variations. We can achieve different visual color ranges of the same geometry so basically the process so far is actually based on this level of character customization.If we have an archer character and we want to create some more representative armor or different design staying within the same set of character’s silhouettes, we can also create some new geometry for the character.

The left side represents level one skin and levels two and three can be achieved in the gaming process. At the same time, we can create different color variations of each set of armors, and in the end, we will have much more variations of the same character. 

This is very typical for NFT games where players like to customize their favorite characters more. Geometry changes are the best way to achieve this kind of stuff while the character stays recognizable.In order for us to preserve the basic silhouette of the character, we will set the silhouette boundaries so that we can have a recognizable shape.

As you can see,  the options are numerous whether we plan to work with colors, patterns, or geometry in order to enable your players to customize their characters in different ways.