Hellenica Party Intros: Diona, the Arktos Part 2

Hellenica's coming out in 2.5 weeks! Head over to the steam page and wishlist it for us, we'd appreciate it!

Last time, I dug into Diona's bear form and some of the fun you can have with Beardozer. Check it out if the thought of running amok as a giant bear in ancient Greece sounds compelling.

Even in her human form Diona's no pushover. She has reduced HP and movement range compared to Beariona, but if you're willing to take some risks with her human skills, she still has great utility and can deal a lot of damage.

First up, her basic dagger attack deals piercing damage to help cut through heavy enemy units, and she gets an extra backstab bonus when she attacks from behind enemies.

With the Roll skill, Diona is able to ignore obstacles and blink four additional spaces. At the end of her roll, she'll perform a dagger attack against any adjacent enemies. That's potentially four backstabs in a single turn!

Diona's not only about damage in human form though. If you'd rather help support your allies more directly, you can unlock Artemis' Blessing, one of the few healing skills in Hellenica.

After two turns, Diona will transform into a thrashing bear again, so you'll have to consider your actions carefully in human form!

On Friday, I'll start introducing Nephele, our theomechanic priestess from the temple of Apollo. Until then, spread the word about Hellenica's launch and get your tactics-loving friends to wishlist it!

Hellenica Party Intros: Diona, the Arktos

It's finally January, and that means Hellenica is launching very soon. If you haven't already hopped over to our steam page, do so and wishlist it! We'd really appreciate your support.

In celebration of the upcoming launch, I'm going to be posting introductions to the party members you'll meet in Hellenica. I'll have a new one up every MWF leading up to our launch on January 23rd, so check back often!

First up is our main protagonist, Diona. She's been with us from the very beginning, but she's gone through some serious changes as the game's developed.

Diona is a disciple of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and as such has been granted the ability to transform into a bear for short durations.

I'll give you a moment to let that sink in.

So how does that work mechanically?

At the start of combat, Diona will transform into a bear. She'll remain in this form for three turns (player and enemy), granting a large boost to her health and movement range. She'll also gain access to a new set of skills that allow her to focus on disrupting and manipulating enemies (or allies!).

One skill you can unlock is called Beardozer. Once unlocked, Diona can charge in a straight line up to five spaces, tossing anything in her way behind her. Enemies, allies, barrels, anything.

Not only is this a good way to cover a lot of distance, it also lets you set up a cluster of enemies for an AoE attack or a line of enemies for a long bounce chain. Beardozing as your first action in a turn means the rest of your party can take advantage of the new positions of up to six characters.

Here's a two-step sequence I set up with Diona and Nephele that exploits a chokepoint to deal a ton of bounce damage:

After three turns Diona will revert to her human form, which enables a completely different set of skills.

Check back on Wednesday for part two where I'll go into the different ways you can outfit Diona's human form to play a support role or a damage role. (Part 2 is here!)

And don't forget to add Hellenica to your wishlist to support us! Thanks!

This changes everything

Every once in a while we implement a change in the project that makes me wonder how I ever enjoyed any of the previous versions. The last couple weeks I've been using some cycles to get our characters animating, and now that Diona is running and jumping around our little worlds, I just can't go back to our older builds. It's SO good to see our characters come to life on the screen!

Here's a quick video of some of her animations in place.

This is the animation graph I'm using to control her:

As far as animation graphs go, it's fairly simple. You can think of each rectangle as a single animation (idling in place, running, or shooting her bow), while the white arrows between the rectangles represent possible transitions between those animations.

So, for example, the arrows connecting diona_run to diona_hop allow Diona to immediately perform a hop while she is running. But, since there are no arrows between diona_run and diona_attack_bow, she has to stop moving and return to the diona_idle state before she can attack.

The nature of our turn-based combat means we can get away with a fairly simple set of transitions, as opposed to say, a real-time shooter game. Here's one part of an animation tree (a specialized kind of graph) from a recent Battlefield game:

It's not unusual for a large AAA studio to have a couple of programmers and a dedicated animation team spend all of their time refining the animation tree of the protagonist character. Maybe for our next game. ;)

I also put together some quick footage I took running around one of our test levels. Take a look!

Now that everything is in place, it's fairly simple to plug in the movement animations for our other characters, and that means our game is quickly coming to life!

Stay tuned for more!

Hellenica Characters: Reworking Diona, Nephele, and Nyx

Now that we've wrapped up most of our character portraits for Hellenica, we had some time to go back and revise some of our earliest characters. We realized that the first pieces we worked on with our previous artists didn't quite match up with the style we established with our current artist. Ack! Who will save us now?!

Oh, I guess our current artist. Probably.

So, we had her do a little touch-up work. Here's a process shot of how our characters were transformed:

Nephele and Nyx were fairly straightforward. We shrunk their heads and eyes down a bit to be closer to the mostly realistic character proportions of our other characters. In Nephele's case, we had to make her nose and mouth a little more well-defined as well.

For Diona, we made similar adjustments to her facial features, but in the end we just weren't happy with the way the pose was working out. During her conversations in game, she looked unbalanced and a bit awkward. So, starting again from the sketch stage we put together something more natural. We already had a great color scheme worked out, so it was a little easier than completely starting from scratch.

And that's that! As on the internet, photoshop can fix any problem. What do you think? We're hopeful that once players get into the game they'll never even know that these three characters were originally done by a different artist!

Hellenica Characters: Diona!

This week we're revealing character art for our main protagonist, Diona, the huntress of Artemis.

Diona is fiercely independent, spending most of her time in the wilderness, away from the bothersome laws and customs of Greece's more metropolitan areas. As a disciple of the Goddess of the Hunt, she excels at hunting and survival, and she prides herself on her abilities and strength. Along with that pride comes a general disdain for other humans, and her interactions with them are usually as short-lived as her hunting quarries.

For Diona, we had a fairly clear image of what we wanted visually. There are a lot of great examples of hunters out there. San from Princess Mononoke was certainly a major influence for us. We also looked to characters like Aragorn, as well as more generic reference material like Ranger, Druid and Barbarian archetypes in various role-playing games.

Once again, our talented artist, Cotton, was able to quickly transform our ideas into sketch form.

The key elements we focused on to capture the huntress look were the draped fur, the animal teeth pendant and knife, the body paint, and the long, wild hair. We also introduced some smaller details to ground her in ancient Greece: the thin sandals, the geometric details on her tunic, and a moon icon on her headband to signify her relationship with Artemis.

Next we tackled the pose. We really wanted Diona to come off as the natural predator she is, perhaps stalking her prey or actively pouncing for an attack. Cotton put together this pose, with her knife drawn and ready to strike.

For colors, we wanted her to look natural as well as sensible. Her self-reliance meant that her clothing would likely be self-made, and she would need darker colors to allow her to stalk her prey effectively. The headband and icon are sacred relics, so we chose a slightly more ethereal blue color to contrast with the rest of her huntress garb.

Thanks for taking a look at how we developed Diona! There will be more character updates to come in the future so check back soon.