Updating the Player Character

The last thing I’ve been working on is the player character.

Once I moved the dinosaurs over to micro voxels, the old character suddenly started to look a bit ridiculous next to them. The original player was only made up of around 12 large voxel blocks, so it was very simple and very blocky.

I actually quite liked that simplicity in a strange way. It had a bit of charm to it. But with the rest of the game becoming more detailed, it was starting to stand out too much.

So I’ve now started bringing some micro voxel detail into the character as well.

The character model is more defined than before, and I’ve also changed the way heads work. There’s still only one head available at the moment, but the system now supports swapping them out. Long term, I want players to be able to choose from a range of different heads so characters can feel a bit more individual.

The bigger change, though, is actually the clothing and armour.

Previously, most clothing was basically just a texture placed over the character. It worked, but it didn’t really give any sense of physical clothing or equipment.

Now the clothing is built out as actual voxel geometry around the player. So things like armour, coats and other wearables have proper shape and volume rather than just being painted onto the body.

I’ve tried to keep that reasonably lightweight as well. At the moment, the player character is around 15,000 triangles at the high end, which I think is a fairly sensible place to be.

Performance is something I’m always keeping in mind, especially because I’m still targeting Steam Deck as a proper platform rather than treating it as an afterthought.

The character still looks a bit funny, and I think that’s okay.

I’m not trying to make Evolve look super realistic. It’s still a voxel game, and I want it to keep some of that character. The goal was really just to make the player feel like they belong in the same world as everything else, and I think it’s getting much closer now.

I’ve also done some work on how equipment stats are presented.

All of the clothing and armour already had values for things like armour, thermal insulation and rain protection, but previously I wasn’t really exposing that information to the player.

Now when you hover over an item in your inventory, you can actually see those values.

I’ve also added a lot more information to the character screen itself. There’s definitely quite a lot going on in there now, but it means you can properly see things like your total armour, how much thermal protection you currently have, and how well protected you are from rain.

That side of the UI will probably keep evolving, but it already makes the equipment system feel much more useful because you can actually understand what the things you’re wearing are doing.