Ioana Sopov

 For the past 3 years I’ve been working on Bear & Breakfast, a casual management-adventure game where you build and run a B&B in the woods… but you’re a Bear. Hank, the bear to be more specific. During production & development, I’ve had a hand in almost all the artwork that made it into the game itself. Starting from concept sketches to environment art, character design, animation and technical art implementation as well as dabbling in shaders and vfx. It’s been an amazing and challenging journey but I feel like it’s the best thing I’ve ever done and has helped me grow as an artist and person in ways I never thought possible before.

See more of the game on www.bear.game & our twitter. Below you can find some concept art, screenshots & splash art.

One of the more challenging aspects of development in the art department for B&B was the pipeline for creating and importing animations for characters in Unity. We wanted Hank, the player character, to be able to equip different clothing items. We also wanted a fair number of animations which included an 8 directional walk cycle and various use/make/idle animations. The resulting assets would traditionally span a rather large number of sprite atlases so we wanted to create an optimized solution. We decided to use texture atlases and a custom importer that would translate the texture atlas to Unity.

Our animation pipeline would start with our amazing animator Alexis Simonetta doing roughs for characters based on their concept art:

I would then take over animation cleanup and split the character into layers if necessary (i.e. separate their face, arms, etc. if needed for layering in-engine) as well as draw and animate clothing items on separate layers:

The resulting texture atlas for each direction of the character (front, back, etc.) would look something like this and would then be imported into Unity:

This pipeline and character animation system would then allow us to also generate a lot of variation of the Guest NPCs that come stay at your B&B.