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❤   / kylebanks  

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Pretty much since Day 1 of Farewell North's development I've had a really big problem to solve a human main character, with a relatively realistic art style, and no ability to bring her to life in the way that's needed to create an emotional connection to the character. For three years I've been working behind the scenes to try to fix this, but in the demo and devlogs I've had to mask the issue by keeping her at a distance or offscreen. That's a pretty big problem when she's meant to be the main character and emotional center of the game!

I tried my best, hired animators, a voice actor, and spent countless hours giving her believable behaviours, but until now she's just felt... lifeless.

With yet another attempt to bring her to life I feel like I've finally cracked it though! I've been adding facial animations to bring her to life with eye tracking, blinking, expressions and lipsync. In this devlog we'll look at how I used Unity and Blender to give her a personality, along with Blender plugins like FaceIt to create phonemes for lip sync animations and facial expressions to allow her emotion to come through in cutscenes and dialogue.

Personally I'm quite thrilled with the results, but of course it's up to you to be the judge. There's still a ways to go to perfect all the expressions, they're very quick to feel "wrong" and quite difficult to get right, but I finally feel like this is a problem that's actually solvable, which is a great feeling.

Credits

Edited by @TheShelfman
Farewell North Original Score by John Konsolakis: www.johnkonsolakis.eu

Game Overview:
Restore color to the desolate islands of Farewell North, an open world journey where you play as a collie traveling with his owner. Explore land and sea, uncover hidden paths, evade monsters, and free wildlife to bring color back to the world while revealing an emotional story about saying farewell.

Twitter:   / kylewbanks  
Website and Email Newsletter: https://farewellnorth.com

0:00 The Problem
0:28 The Uncanny Valley
2:00 The Solution
2:28 Blink and Eye Animation
5:35 Support Development :)
6:44 Lip Sync
9:33 Facial Animation
11:36 Meet the Main Character
12:08 Outro

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