More about the hub area, a little bit about character design and naming conventions
So while in the caves you control a little robot drone, in the hub area – the Testing Fields you will be controlling a cyborg man floating around on a mechanical Control Platform. This means you will play as him when interacting with NPCs and when fighting bosses. The cave Drone is supposed to be piloted remotely by this character and I will at some point make a little animation where a drone is released from this platform whenever you want to enter a cave area.
The idea for this character is that he’s a human currently occupying a very basic cyborg body. I designed it like that because I wanted to add unlockable customization clothing/body options for him, though I will leave that idea for later for now. I do know I can make it from the technical side of things, but it is quite time consuming. I had quite a lot of character customization in Human Upgrade Labs, my previous game.
I’m thinking of naming him Halcyon Days. I have different naming schemes for each category of monsters/characters. So for now the names work something like this:
Fantasy names: must include a Lithuanian word( excluding Lithuanian only letters, I don’t want to torture people) e.g. Branch Stichija
Horror names: a somewhat normal name + “the” + something edgy or fancy. E.g. Cornelius the Judgmental Gaze.
Scifi names: basically just bad band names, haha. E.g. Halcyon Days or Glorious Sycatrix. I will stick with somewhat possible names for characters, but I want to go really dumb with these for monsters. Cause why not.
Cartoon names: still figuring this out, but probably 3 or 4 word names, each word starting with the same letter.
There’s no real reason for these, it’s just nice to have some sort of theme to make it easier to come up with names, especially when I need a lot of them for each monster and I chose something I like. I named all characters in another game ( Dream Mechanic) using references to various UFO encounters but it took some serious digging to come up with 25-ish names to go with that theme.
I honestly think Halcyon Days sound kinda cool. It’s an old expression basically meaning the good old days and also I first heard the word “halcyon” in an electronic song called Halcyon Plus On Plus On, or some such, by Orbital, and it stuck with me.
And here is another character I designed a while ago. He is supposed to be the first NPC you encounter explaining some of the basics and I imagine him kinda like an old colleague of the main guy, just more serious( as opposed to the more casual and a bit apathetic main dude) and more into massive cybernetic, bicep heavy enhancements. I’m calling this guy Evergreen Dreams:
Also here are a couple of gifs of how I painted the artwork for these. I designed both months ago actually, so I have uploaded those to my portfolios and such already:
Does anyone else have some unusual methods for naming things, I’m curious?