Day 1

Day 1 I came up with a vague ides for the game, the theme was hell, so I decided to go with some pop cultural death figure, I went through a few mythological figures, Charon the ferryman and Hades, but inevitably settled on the grim reaper. So I did some research into stylised grim reaper characters, got some concept art, and made a quick concept image:

The idea was that he was a card collector and had a pack of cards on him. This changed when I started making the character, I decided to keep the cloak skull and scythe, but got rid of the card pack instead making it so that there's nothing under the cloak but a suit, something I was planning on making a feature (when you cut down a card you're suit changes to match, hearts, clubs, spades or diamonds).

I started to make some materials for the character, the bone with a rough white material with cracks all around it, which I fed into the emission:

A cloak material which was a bit wasteful as you can barely see it with the colour black:

And a few Materials for the scythe, one for the handle (top left) and the others going from the centre of the blade to the edge, getting shinier and darker as the it goes, the centre of the blade (top right) being the roughest, the mid point (bottom left) being a bit smoother with a stronger bump map; and the edge with smoothest material and strongest bump map as well as being darker. Since they were all made using as instances of the one material they share the same noise data so the pattern matches on all of them:

I baked all these materials to the reaper and made two materials for him to go in engine, one for the reaper, and one for the symbol, which I would control in engine to give it a bit of Fresnel and add some other effects.

Next I made the rig for the character, I knew I wanted the cloak to move a lot, so I focused bone placement and weight painting on giving smooth transitions between each bone. I made it so that the skull would have a bit more control by giving it a controller bone with a "track to" constraint that would make it follow this bone, and then did the same for the hood. Then I parented the skull bone to the hood, so that you can turn the head and then have a bit more control by moving the skull separately, which allowed for a bit more follow through on the head. I gave the scythe a parent bone around where you would hold it, so that you can animate from there instead of from the base. I then created a bone to control the shape of the centre suit. This was a bit of a waste of time, because I would control this in engine, but I set up some drivers that control the shape keys I made for the suit by location. Here's the basic rig:

Then I started animating, trying to create some good cloth animations.

Then the character was done. I brought him in engine and made a simple movement script and let him attack, as well as a script to make walls invisible to see through them (I never used this though)

Resources and tutorials used: