Krister Karlsson – Art Director, Creative Director & Producer at
Modesty
The dream of making a video game has been in me since my dad was convinced to by me and my brothers a Commodore 64 back in the days. A few years later me and some buddies had spent 1 or 2 years on our first Amiga title –
Shenandoah, as we called it. It was going pretty well. We had a full demo of the first level, and a publisher from the UK. We were featured in Amiga Format and Commodore User, which were major mags at the time. Then one day one of the programmers came out about being in love with the other programmer who then left for Seattle and never came back… Of all the strange things that can get in the way of game production.
Now almost 20 years later an opportunity arose in my company to make a mobile game with a small team of four. Early last year I got an idea for a game in which you would play a ghost. I thought it would be interesting to play the monster instead of the monster hunter. This idea arose from Pac Man actually. As an avid retro gamer I like to play old titles to draw inspiration from.
During last summer we discussed the game concept further and all through production actually. So everyone was involved in the creative process which I believe was a great benefit to the game.
Obviously the game grew in terms of complexity, as most projects do. And as the only artist on the game, as well as being the creative director and producer I was in great need of help to get my part done and to keep the pace with the rest of the team. However I was in no way going to let the quality suffer and the budget was too tight to get an additional team member.
Then one day I was browsing for models on Turbosquid, for another project I was doing at the same time, and came upon some animations from
Mixamo. Curious as ever I went to check it out and could’t quite grasp what I saw. It just seemed too good to be true. Could this actually work this well right there in the browser? It was 2012, not 2022, I thought to myself. After doing some more testing I had just freed myself from a ton of late night and weekend work. Animating somewhere around 12 characters for the game would’ve taken forever for someone who’s not focusing on character animation. Because of the gameplay and camera angle in the game I didn’t even have to tweak the
Auto-Rigger results. What a relief it was when I realized that this solution would work.
What I did with the characters then was to render them all in one long sequence – all the characters with their different animations. Those separate png’s were then processed by an atlas creator, which is basically a small piece of software that copies the content of the png’s into a 1024×1024 image map. All the motions of two characters would fit into one image, so we created several images to hold all characters in the game. The graphics engine then uses these atlases to draw the graphics in the game.
We’re all extremely pleased with the result and critics has shown the same enthusiasm, especially for the looks of the game. Comments like: “Hauntingly beautiful” and “It simply looks brilliant” puts a great big smile on my face off course. And Mixamo was a part of making that happen!”
Sincerly, Krister Karlsson
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