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ColePowered Games Ltd.

The Game development adventures of Cole Jefferies.

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #27: Populating the Population: Clothing

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #27: Populating the Population: Clothing

August 27, 2021 colej Comments 0 Comment

Shadows of Doubt is a detective stealth game set in a fully-simulated sci-fi metropolis! There’s been a murder and it’s up to you to solve it by any means necessary, with the condition that you keep a low profile. A unique mix of procedural generation and hand-crafted design enables every room of every building to be explored. Be sure to wishlist on Steam, join our Discord or read previous dev blog entries here!

Hi everybody, welcome back to our more-regular-than-ever dev blog! This time we’re continuing to talk about the citizen visuals; Miles the voxel artist will take you through his workflow of creating clothing. Take it away Miles…

Intro

Last blog I talked about making voxel faces for the citizens in Shadows of Doubt and the challenges that come with that. This week, we’ll be looking at the modeling of the citizens as a whole and their outfits!

If you follow us on social media, you may have noticed that the citizens’ wardrobe selection has expanded beyond trench coats and trilbies. Don’t worry, you’ll still find this dapper detective look around the city. However, you’ll also see a range of other outfits; from casual jeans and shirts to snazzy dresses and to classy suits.

In this blog, I’ll run you through what it takes to create a new outfit for the game and the decisions I make when designing them.

Creating the Outfits

All designs start with a little bit of research. Usually, this entails googling 1920-80s clothing and finding some simple inspiration there. However, I’ll often look up outfits worn by celebrities from this time, or I’ll draw inspiration from noir films, such as ‘The Maltese Falcon’.

To model an outfit there are a few important limitations that need to be addressed to get it working in Shadows of Doubts. For the purposes of procedural generation, every outfit, ideally, can be worn by every citizen and have a random colour. Therefore, when an outfit is modelled, it is modelled six times. Three times for each body type we have, and then another three times so that there is a masculine and feminine version.

To get the random colours, the model is first created fully coloured so I can get a good idea of how it “should” look. It is then manually grey-scaled to allow the code to recolour it properly, and with this, I create the colour map to select each area to be recoloured differently. Generally, the outfits have 3 colours to be replaced: red, green and blue, however, I’ll also use black on the colour map to maintain certain colours from the base texture before being recoloured by the code, like a white shirt or black buttons.

Once this first version is completed each model needs to be checked to make sure it works with the animation and other outfits that it’ll randomly generate with. The outfits replace the models for the arms, legs, body, etc. so making sure that they all align properly and there are no oddities sticking out when a character is walking is important. A good amount of trial and error is needed, going back and forth between Unity and Qubicle, chopping off voxels here and there to ensure the outfit works well. Generally, the tops and the bottoms, as well as dresses, are built from a standardised base design and this helps reduce the amount of trial and error needed to rework the outfits to a good standard.

With voxel models, the texturing and the modelling is often one in the same process. Particularly for lower resolution voxel models. It’s very easy to simply retexture while working in Qubicle. Moreover, the folds of clothing and the surface texturing is baked into the base texture model, rather than using polygons. This means combining the texturing and modelling processes is important because it’ll help me make decisions as to how to get a good clothing “look”.

Unique Outfits

While it is desirable to make all tops and bottoms work together to get a huge diversity of procedurally generated outfits, there are some cases where this simply wouldn’t allow for enough shape variation. The biggest cause of this is that the tops and bottoms need to sit flush at the interface of where they meet at the waist. If this interface differs between each outfit there’s usually some weird clipping when you start to mix and match them.

To get around this there are a few “complete” outfits, these are ones that cover the full body and don’t mix and match several pieces. It’s far easier to create a unique shape if the whole outfit works as one. The gold jacket and white trousers in the screenshot above is one such example. Another example is the dresses. Which also provided another significant challenge…

There are no custom animations for the outfits, therefore for dresses, the design must allow for leg movement without the model deforming to keep the fixed voxel shape. As a result, the dresses are made as a solid objects because this means as the legs split apart for the walking animation they appear as one continuous surface. If they were hollow, you would essentially see the dress split apart too when walking.

A similar design is used for the trench coats, but, as these maintain the models for the upper legs a weird little wall of voxels is used to hide when the legs split apart when walking. However, this may need further work if it poses an issue during sitting animations where you can see the underside of the upper leg models.

Other notable unique outfits are those that are used for specific professions. For factory workers, I’ve created some lovely work overalls to wear instead of getting their trench coats dirty! And then for the police officers, we created a somewhat dystopian twist on the traditional British police uniform. They’ve got the vintage smart black uniform, and custodian helmet, however, we’ve attached a riot gear visor. This helps enforce the idea that they’re privatised security and gives them an impersonal feel as it obscures their identity.

Other Features

Recently we introduced glasses and hats into the character generation – I find they really help add a great amount of personality to the characters, with very little effort.

This will be a niche reference, but in continuation of our internal ‘this citizen looks like x person’ game: This dude really reminds me of British vocalist Richard Hawley – Cole.

We also have a huge variety of hairstyles. Conveniently the hairstyles are designed to work with any head shape as they all follow the same structure, unlike the clothing. This means any single hairstyle can be used for all 6 head types.

Lastly, shoes! The shoes aren’t part of the outfits as such, because they can be an important clue for your detective work. Currently, there are 3 types of shoes, your bog-standard kind, boots and heels. They have a higher resolution to the rest of the citizens’ outfits to allow you to distinguish the detail on them.

Final Thoughts

Cole has recently spoken in a blog post about generating the personalities of citizens: https://colepowered.com/2020/10/ Eventually we would like to tie this into the citizens clothing choices. Therefore, someone who is happy and outgoing are more likely to wear brighter and outlandish outfits. And we can then use this to tailor specific outfits to the personalities so that there is a broad spectrum of personalities encompassed by the clothing.

Thanks Miles! Tune in this time next month for more…

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Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #26: Populating the Population: Sculpting Faces

Shadows of Doubt DevBlog #26: Populating the Population: Sculpting Faces

July 30, 2021 colej Comments 2 comments

Shadows of Doubt is a detective stealth game set in a fully-simulated sci-fi metropolis! There’s been a murder and it’s up to you to solve it by any means necessary, with the condition that you keep a low profile. A unique mix of procedural generation and hand-crafted design enables every room of every building to be explored. Be sure to wishlist on Steam, join our Discord or read previous dev blog entries here!

Hi everyone! In this month’s dev blog I’m going to hand the reigns over to Miles, the talented pixel and voxel artist who’s now behind a lot of the new models you now see in Shadows of Doubt. This year one of the biggest challenges has been revamping the citizens: Part of the game’s appeal is the city’s generated population of individuals, each with their own personalities and looks. This blog focuses on the challenge of sculpting their faces…

Creating faces in low resolution

Recently we have been giving the citizens of Shadows of Doubt an overhaul. We have upped their resolution slightly, given them new clothes, and most importantly faces, with eyes and mouths and ears! We are also working on the citizen’s style choices: beards, hairdos, moustaches, tops, hats, dresses, etc. All of this should give a bit more life to the people walking around the streets of the city as well as a recognisable and individual identity.


One of the biggest challenges with voxel faces is adding subtle differences in order to generate diversity. It is particularly difficult to make masculine and feminine faces distinct and believable at such a low resolution. There are some key features that help communicate whether a face is masculine or feminine; primary details such as, head shape, brow line form, chin, cheek and jawline structure, hairline position, nose shape, lips. Then there are secondary details like hairstyle and facial hair which can be used for further emphasis.


Below is a comparison between the masculine and feminine heads and their different face shapes. I will explain the design choices I made, and hopefully, some of you can benefit from this analysis to help create your own voxel characters, or you might simply find it interesting.

Primary details

One of the most notable details is the overall head shape, more rounded for feminine heads and squarer for masculine heads. To portray roundness there is an extra voxel between the top of the forehead and the hairline, softening the interface between the face and the top of the head. For masculine faces the hairline tends to start higher up, therefore by having the forehead 3 voxels tall the illusion that the hairline starts higher up is created. In addition to this, male pattern baldness can be created by simply having the voxels of the corner of the forehead be skin coloured, which also makes the heads appear squarer.


A wider brow is a notable masculine trait, this is simply done by making the brow 5 voxels wide. Prominent cheekbones are a more feminine characteristic, however, on both styles, the face width is 5 voxels wide. Yet, by having the brow of feminine heads only 3 voxels, the cheekbones appear to sit further out and thus appear more prominent.


Another masculine feature is that of the nose, the bridge of the nose starts higher up, and this is simply communicated with having two voxels for the nose. Whereas, for a feminine face the nose is only one voxel. The added benefit of this is that it helps emphasise the roundedness or squareness of the head.


Masculine faces typically have stronger, wider chins when compared with feminine faces, however, this detail is difficult to communicate without trying to make feminine chins be only a single voxel wide or underdeveloped. Instead, simply a standard neutral ground for both chins was chosen.

Secondary details

Once these primary details are figured out, then hairstyles and facial hair can be added. Having a base hair area textured onto the head helps ensure the haircut models work seamlessly and look natural. Hair colour and skin colour can be randomised using the colour shaders and a whole plethora of unique looking citizens cans be created.

We’ll be continuing this dev blog miniseries next month with some further insights into our progress on the citizens, stay tuned!

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Indie Games developer, currently working on detective simulator game ‘Shadows of Doubt’. I also made Concrete Jungle.

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