Island Heist: The MOP Hero
Island Heist is a tech demo of what could potentially be made into a small platforming game in the future. This project was developed in collaboration with an artist and a level designer. I did the rig, animations and implemented them into the game. Tjobbo: The Mop Hero is a janitor turned burglar. He steals from the rich and gives to the poor, like Robin hood but with a mop to his aid.
Character artist, props and food block assets – Mons Finn Bergman
Level Designer and Environment Art - Robin Jansson
Chimneys – Anton Sjöholm
Assets pack - Alexsandr Ivanov
Program: Maya 2019
Engine: Unreal Engine 4.26.1
THE RIG
With the early concepts I knew instantly that a cartoony rig was what I was aiming for. I decided to go for a ribbon spine so I could squash and stretch the character. After implementing IK stretch on the arms and legs on my other project, Skater Gurl, I added it to this rig as well. With that in place I could exaggerate the jump even more.
IK knee pop is every animator’s nightmare. When the Alpha animations were done I knew that the big feet of our Mop Hero could take away a lot of hours on tweaking away that popping. After doing some research I made a scaling solution for his knees. This allowed me to scale the knee joint to match the feet in a more efficient way.
The eye rig was the last thing I implemented. Being able to blink and look around made the character look more alive.
Animations and gameplay
Splatoon is the reference for the character design. When I looked for references, I turned to Sora in Kingdom Hearts 1 for the clear posing he has and Sly Cooper for the swiftness in the move set.
In the beginning I wanted to do a pole vault for the long jump action. However, due to the complexity of the setup, I came up with another idea that I pitched to the level designer and the character artist. Instead of using root motion I simplified it and decided to make the character spin the mop so fast it would work as a propeller. This made it easier to implement and test quickly. Being able to test so soon I could iterate upon my animations and make sure they were just right. And to be frank, it just a funnier way to use a mop!
To make the idle feel more alive, I added a couple of different idles that I'm blending through random sequence player in the idle state machine. I also added a swirly swoosh-effect for the spinning mop as a finishing touch.