The Eldritch Zookeeper - Run a cursed zoo, badly.

Cranktrain

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Hi everyone. I've been using Spine Professional since November last year, and I've been loving it, and thought I'd display the game I'm currently writing.

The Eldritch Zookeeper is a game where a deeply unfortunate zookeeper is cursed to run a zoo of inter-dimensional monsters. Think Zoo Tycoon, but with more creatures breaking out of their pens to devour the visitors. Every day, a portal opens to a world beyond sanity, and out drops a crate, containing some dreadful cosmic horror that our hapless zookeeper must 'take care of' (not be eaten by). Build fences, fill your pens with beasts from the void, and try and keep them fed and happy. Or else.

It's being written in Unity, art painted in Photoshop, and Spine sitting in the middle. I'm at the stage in development where I'm stripping out all the prototype art, and replacing them with fancy animated characters.

Here's one playable zookeeper:

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And here's another:

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I did replace those checkerboard fence posts and walls with some models with proper UV's:

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Using the same Spine skeleton as for the player, I've been able to get guests in-game rather swiftly:

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Those just show male guests, also got female visitors in too:

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Also using Spine for not-so-animated objects, like boxes containing monster food:

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I'm blending the animations together with Mecanim.

Currently working on the actual animated monsters, so I'll post some of them soon! All the images are using the current standard Spine/Skeleton shader, so the colours are all very bright. My project is somewhat banking on Magelight to look the best it can, so I'll revisit colours when I have to normal map all my characters.

It's coming along! No website for the game yet, but I'm updating my Twitter regularly.

Cranktrain

BinaryCats

cool game

Søren

This is cool! 😃 I'm imagining hundreds of zombies walking around there now.

Cranktrain

Thanks BinaryCats, Shiu.

Been working on animating one of the monsters that the player has to keep in their zoo:

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Søren

Somebody call Steve Irving, we have a lose crocodile!

BinaryCats

Shiu wrote
Somebody call Steve Irving, we have a lose crocodile!

im not sure you know what a crocodile looks like, its clearly a kiwi

Cranktrain

It's been ages since I've updated this thread, so might as well update it with a video:

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Lots of Spine characters in there, including the new logo, what fun.

AlstonA

I've been looking at the development videos on youtube. It's coming along great! 😃

Cranktrain

Thanks AlstonA!

And I've done another devlog -

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Using Spine in a new way there, or at least for a new purpose, for the User Interface. Many games used to use Scaleform to allow Flash for their rich user interfaces, and I suppose Spine is my version of that.

Did another devlog, this time with a new monster animated with Spine:

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First time making use of the Path constraint tool, really does make animating tentacles a million times easier! Combining the Spine-based monster with Unity particle effects, but still need to add proper lighting to really sell the fire, even when the zoo is fully ablaze it all looks a bit flat right now.

Happy New Year! Still been using a lot of Spine recently, and so here's another devlog:

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Stripping out, throwing away, and redesigning (and reanimating) an entire monster in the game only took a total of four days, which is mostly testament to the Photoshop -> Spine -> Unity pipeline that just works so well. Makes me less scared of doing similar reworks in the future, which of course, I don't want to do, but will probably have to.

Just published the first trailer for the game!

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Loads of Spine animation in there, as you can see. There's also a Steam page for the game too: http://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zookeeper/

Nate

I love it, it looks really cool! 🙂 I'm not sure why anyone would visit this zoo though, as they are almost certain to get eaten and/or caught on fire. 😃