It was a huge pleasure to participate in Ludum Dare 50 and we want to thank everyone who has made our first game jam such a great experience! It is stunning to see so many creative people coming together to create thousands of unique masterpieces. While we had a lot of fun during this challenge, we also see a great chance to learn from each other. With that in mind, we want to give you quick insights into the process of creating the main character – "Günther" – of our game.

Concept 💭, Modelling 🔨 and Texturing 🎨

After the basic concept was established, we came up with the idea to make the character look like a clumsy fisherman or a ship's captain who is sitting in an undersize rubber dinghy, ironically struggling to control it.

Starting with a quick sketch, we created low poly meshes of the character, the boat as well as the tools and textured them using a custom color palette in blender (by the way, what an amazing piece of software!).

Rigging 🦴

Günther still looked a little bit stiff, we gave him some bones so he could relax. We setup different constraints like Inverse Kinematics to make animating easier.

Animation 🏃‍♂️

In the following process, 14 seconds of various motion sequences had to be animated. This included different idle animations, rowing, fixing the boat in different positions and more.

Controller 🧠

All animated sequences came together in Unity (another great software some of you might heard of :P), where an Animator Controller was setup with different states and transitions to blend between the animations.

💡 Tip: Unity's Blend Trees can be extremely useful to make animations more dynamic, this was used to blend between the rowing as well as animations for fixing the boat at any given spot.

A character controller, that was programmed to control the motion and mechanics of the character, brings Günther finally to life.

Result 🎉

Play Paddle Panic 🚣‍♂️ to see Günther in action!