It’s a action adventure game set in a open world, where you team up with the monsters you catch and battle other duelists while exploring the world, along an (hopefully) immersive story.

Speaking of Gameplay

Some people in the last videos asked me in the comments, why I started with environment art.

Well, the truth is, that I didn’t - I did both simultaneously and just made the environment videos first. But just like with environment, for the past months, I’m just experimenting, what gameplay I actually want for the game and how to implement it.

But lets get back to the topic of remaking the character (currently still known as Emko, at the time of the devlog). First, I just made some concepts, by taking inspiration from the chibi Emko and applying it to an adult version.

And here is a concept I made very early on, on which the character is based on and with that I made another concept and a rough 3D model in Blender. I did change things like the proportions (of course), the hair and details on clothing.

After I had the base mesh done, I added clothing, hair and so on, textured that with simple plain colors, no crazy shading or hand painting. I thought that would look the best in game with cel-shading.

Lastly, I re-rigged the character and voila, we went from chibi Emko:

To adult Emko:

and I think it is a big improvement.

btw. I will _not_ throw away the chibi model - I will probably find some use case for it, either in a different game or in mini-games in this current game.

Then I had to animate the new Emko model and I again detected a crazy weak point of mine.

I watched countless of videos, spend much time animating the last months, but it’s really really hard for me to actually make something good. Like, I understand the concept, read and watched videos about the basics, but when it comes to translating that to Blender and applying that knowledge - I just can not.

But after spending a lot of time, I kinda got something decent for `Idle`, `Walk`, `Jog` and `Sprint` - aaand some small placeholder animations/poses, so we don’t T-Pose for other states.

I felt animating the faster movements like Jogging or Sprinting, much more enjoyable to animate, then slow stuff, like Idle or Walk - I guess, because mistakes are more visible in slower animations?

After all that, I plugged everything together, assigned the correct animations to the corresponding states and now we have a new Emko model with some fresh animations and big shoutout to ritpop for this drawing of Emko.

Thanks for watching! Please read or watch the other devlogs!

This was posted originally `Jul 11, 2023` on YouTube, and is a slightly edited version written `Nov 24, 2025`