[BLOG] The Creation of Oscar (Patreon)

Oscar was never in the original BBU game jam. Once we started making the game full time we needed a companion character. Why? Simply because most platformers have one! Most people will associate this to Banjo and Kazooie, but every platformer I played as a child would have a sidekick so it seemed like a logical move.  

- Rachet and Clank

- Jak and Daxter

- Spryo and Sparx 

- Spike and Pipotchi (Ape Escape 2)

However, a friend soon approached me "if you're going to have a sidekick, don't have one for the sake of it, give them a reason to exist"  

To me this meant giving the character a skill set of their own or to perhaps use them as an additional mechanic (similar to how Banjo would use Kazooie to fly) This is how Oscar became his own playable character. On top of this I would always feel frustrated that I couldn't play as Daxter (thank goodness for the PSP standalone game Daxter)

In the first draft Billie's main 'collectable' would be tiny cages with kidnapped goat children from Billies village. She would free them and they would proceed to follow her for the rest of the level aiding her in platforming puzzles by creating bridges, ladders or holding down enemies. They would then return to the hub world and create a ladder to give you a 'lift' to the next World. This idea was soon scrapped as we felt the game might be too technical and advanced for us to make.

Enter Oscar. For story reasons we wanted her companion to be a predator, Billie would be taking in an enemy and raising it as her own. Originally Oscar started life as a wolf with floppy ears.

However, after putting both characters together their similar blue grey colour palettes blended together. If we wanted Oscar to sit on Billies head he would have to stand out. Due to orange being the complimentary colour to blue we went with a fox. 

Thus started the sculpting process in Zbrush. Now I am a firm believer in getting external feedback. Thanks to the power of Twitter I have been able to improve all of our characters by uploading their concept sheets and WIP work online. I recommend others to do the same, it's better to get feedback earlier and fix things during the concepting phase than it is when the character is fully rigged and animated. 

Oscar originally had one floppy ear, this helped to add some asymmetry to his design (similar to Billie's one eye patch) but it was pointed out to me on many occasions that foxes did not have floppy ears and his face appeared more "dog like" than "fox like". 

I removed his floppy ear and used his red bandanna as another way of breaking up the symmetry.

The hardest part was getting the eyes right, as you can see I went through many iterations for this before getting the right feel for the character. Soon after Oscar was rigged and animated 

Luke tried some test poses for Oscar to help reflect his personality and test his rig for any odd deformations. Originally we used Maya LT but found it difficult to animate a quad based character so we had to upgrade to full Maya.

And there you have it, from concept to animation, Oscar was born