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CryptidCam

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CryptidCam

2 in Group Chat

Head into the spooky woods to lure out and take photos of creatures like The Loch Ness Monster, The Loveland Frogman, Bigfoot, and more fan favorite cryptids in this short, light hearted photography adventure.

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Making of Tsuchinoko

Apr 30

Tsuchinoko is the second cryptid I added to CryptidCam. His design is pretty simple, so it didn't take a lot of sketch iteration to feel like I had it. There's a little more Pokemon inspiration here, since I like the kind of dopey closed eye look they give to Dunsparce, and I wanted my Tsuchinoko to have a bit of a lazy vibe as well.

He does win the award for silliest T pose in my game though:

Modeling Tsuchi was really straightforward. He's another pretty resource light model, coming in at 664 tris total. Less than the Jackalope by almost half, but still not the lowest poly model in the game. Any guesses who that honor goes to?

I remember the real struggle with Tsuchinoko came when it was time to animate him. There are probably better ways to animate snake movement so the bones programmatically follow a sine wave or something, but I didn't know how to do that or even how to find out at the time, so I animated his slither manually. It took a lot of iteration to get it to look natural.

He also has a couple disjointed bones for controlling his tongue, which I think is pretty funny. He doesn't have a real working mouth, the tongue just kind of retracts into his head when I don't want to show it.

It's also been funny seeing the various ways people react to Tsuchinoko. He's a bit of a meme in some circles, but broadly I think he's not very well known in the Western world. Most people I talk to about my game know Bigfoot and Nessie when I give those as examples, but mentioning Tsuchinoko almost invariably gets either a confused reaction followed by struggling to repeat the name back, or instant recognition with a "Tsuchinoko Real". That said, a recent Japanese post[news.denfaminicogamer.jp] about CryptidCam mentioned Tsuchinoko and Nessie as examples of well known characters and the Flatwoods Monster as a more niche one. In my experience people in North America are much more likely to know the Flatwoods Monster than Tsuchinoko, so it's interesting to me how cultural and subjective these things are.

CryptidCam

Making of The Jackalope

Feb 20

I already shared my first sketch of the Jackalope for CryptidCam back in my post about early CryptidCam sketches, but here's his dopey little face again before we get into it.

I knew pretty early on I wanted Jackalope to be the main mascot of my game, so in subsequent sketches I really tried to emphasize his roundness and cuteness. He ended up with kind of a Pikachu feel, which felt appropriate to me.

The 3D model for the Jackalope was the first model I did for CryptidCam, and the most complicated 3D model I had made up to that point. I had enough 3D modeling experience to know you need to draw a front and side view for reference, but not enough experience to notice the places where my front and side view didn't quite line up or gave mixed messages about what the final form would be. I ended up having to solve a lot of problems on the fly with this design, but it was a really helpful learning experience for my next 3D model.

I've come a long way since making the Jackalope model, so it's hard for me to look back at it and not think about all the ways I could make it better if I were to do it again now. But resisting the urge to redo previous work is an essential skill for devs that ever want to finish anything. The Jackalope might also be lower poly than you would've guessed, at a little under 1200 tris. My cel shader does a lot to make things look smoother than they are.

When texturing I also made the decision to give the Jackalope paw pads, mostly because I thought they'd be a cute touch. Paw pads like these aren't accurate to real life rabbits; usually only predators who stalk their prey have them, because their main purpose is to dampen the sounds of approaching footsteps. We only ever see Jackalopes eat carrots in CryptidCam, but I think the implication that they might actually be stealth hunters is pretty funny.

CryptidCam

Playtest Ending April 10th

Mar 27

Hi Folks, thank you so much to everyone who participated in the first CryptidCam Steam playtest! I was able to gather a lot of helpful feedback and identify and fix quite a few issues thanks to all of your help.

I wanted to let you know that I'll be closing this playtest in two weeks, on April 10th, in preparation for the release of the public demo. If you haven't had a chance to play it and give feedback, you still have time! But if you miss this chance, the next chance to play when the demo releases won't be far off.

Thanks again!

CryptidCam

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