Returning to the Edge: Part II

Old Friends / New Faces

Part of the fun of returning to the universe of Planet’s Edge is revisiting my old friends William, Katya, Osai, and Nelson. As the crew of the original Ulysses, they trekked through the wilds of our galaxy on a desperate mission to save Earth, but did so as relatively contemporary stand-ins for the player. Set in the 2040s — only fifty years ahead of the time in which I was writing the original — I wanted the crew to be relatable to the player. They would be the children and grandchildren of the world that was evolving when we were developing the game. Then, as now, there were momentous things going on in the world. The First Gulf War. The fall of the Soviet Union. The End of Apartheid. The original Star Trek had framed its story in the idea that despite the chaos of the sixties, mankind would overcome their differences, join together, and voyage out into the stars. What I wanted to do with Edge was back up a bit and find the moment when we took our very first steps, but had to work together in a universe that at best wasn’t interested in us, or at worst, was out to annihilate us. The only way we would survive was working together.

Now I will be the first to admit that the player back then would not have picked up on most of that. The dialogue in the game was largely there to tell the player where to go and what to do, which was a function of the way games were made at New World Computing at the time. What you were given would not have held up as strongly as the story or characters presented in Betrayal at Krondor, or even Dungeon Siege for that matter. I needed a couple more years of experience and a longer narrative leash to get there. Nonetheless, each of the leads in Edge had moments in the original where they were uniquely qualified to tackle particular problems or puzzles that the player encountered along the way. I intend to double down on that idea in this rebootquel, and get more into their backstories and motivations.

The “familiarity” of the characters didn’t just stop with their ties to the geopolitical events of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The physical look of all four player characters were modeled on people at New World or the wives and girlfriends of our team mates. Part of the fun of the original (at least for me), was driving around all those friends of mine and putting them in one sticky predicament after another.

For the new iteration, the player will start off with the same crew of four, but they’ll be fully realized in 3D. This means that the original art assets aren’t usable, and wouldn’t be suitable for the graphical update I’m giving to the project anyway. I toyed with the idea of trying to recontact all of our original PE faces (I’m still in touch with three of them), but in the end I realized that in order to model these characters myself I need to work with a tool that requires seven photographs of each subject taken from very specific angles and under specific lighting conditions. The chances are not at all good that my original four have thirty-year-old photos that meet the necessary criteria. As handsome and beautiful as they all are after all these years, I’m recasting the “big four” with new friends who can pass as the vaguely thirty to forty somethings who serve as the crew of the Ulysses.

To bring these new characters to life in 3D, I’m having to learn a new skill set. I’ve done quite a bit of modeling for props and architecture in the past, but creating people and creatures are a whole new arena for me. Making living or organic creatures is much more complicated than dealing with static objects. There’s a reason that in the art department of any game there are specific artists whose sole job is dealing with characters and critters because its an insanely technical job. Beyond modeling the characters and texturing them, there’s a huge amount of work that needs to be done to animate them (called “rigging”), and then the actual work of creating the motion captures, and so on and so on. Thankfully, there are now tools to make this process a lot easier for knuckle-dragging morons like myself who haven’t devoted years to just to this particular skill.

Metahuman Creator, developed for the Unreal gaming engine, provides a whole collection of “starter heads” that a designer can tweak towards the look they are looking for. It also allows you to pick a body (from a very limited selection) that is “pre-rigged” (e.g., set up for animation) and it can be dropped directly into Unreal. In general, Metahuman’s fairly easy to use if you don’t expect to make dramatic changes to the starter heads. After some twiddling around with it, the only character that I was able to get a reasonable approximation of was Nelson, the ship’s engineer (originally portrayed by Louis Johnson, the lead artist on Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra, who also contributed art to Planet’s Edge).

NEW FACE, SAME ATTITUDE - Capturing Nelson’s calm and cool personality is vital to conveying the personality of the Captain of the Ulysses, and the mission’s Chief Engineer. (UPPER RIGHT, Nelson as he appeared in the original game. LOWER LEFT, Nelson as created in Metahuman).

In order to fill out the rest of the crew, I knew that I’d need to use the 3D modelling program Blender and a special plugin from KeenTools called FaceBuilder that would allow more control over the modeling process. I decided to start with designing the character of William, who essentially was the team leader on planetside missions (essentially our game’s Riker). Of the four, his was the character that was most like me. If you look at the game and the game manual, his backstory is a thinly tweaked version of my own, albeit with a few important differences, notably his experiences as a pilot and athlete. He’ll lean even deeper into my heritage for the new game.

After combing through photos on my social media profiles, I decided that my friend Court Jones would be the best person upon which to model William’s new face. Although he’s chronologically older than the character, if you ignore the salt in his hair, he’s still a pretty youthful-looking guy. He’s always had this very heroic profile which fits my image of the character. Being that Court is also a highly awarded artist and caricaturist living here in San Diego, I knew he’d understand exactly how I needed the reference photos to be taken and lit. As mentioned before, he shot photos of his head from the seven necessary angles.

COURT ORDERED - The seven reference photos provided by Court for my modeling effort.

Pulling the seven photos into Blender + FaceBuilder, I was then able to model something that at least generally, vaguely resembled Court.

JOHN GLENN VIBES - Maybe it’s because the modeling process flattens out everyone’s hair and makes them look like they’ve had a buzz cut, but I definitely was getting Right Stuff vibes from this model. I’d follow this guy into space on a desperate mission to save the Earth.

For the next step, I then needed to pull the 3D model of Court into Metahuman where I could attach his head to a body, make some tweaks, give him hair, teeth, and eyeballs, pick new skin — which in this case definitely de-ages him so that he looks about the right age — and attach him to an animation rig. The problem with this process is that along with adding all this cool stuff, it conforms the model to its standardized head so the resemblance is further diminished by another degree.

SON OF COURT - The alterations to his appearance in Metahuman still show some resemblance to Court, but by this stage he looks more like a relative than the man himself, but it’s definitely within the ballpark of what I was looking for.

For the last stage of getting ‘William’ ready for his closeup in Unreal, I needed to create a new version of his uniform from UNFA (United Nations First Approach - the organization that sends his team on their rescue mission.) Canonically, the original uniforms were a mix between Space 1999 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with the color schemes essentially replicating those of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I decided to switch up the departmental colors a bit, and add a little more styling to them for some retro Rocky Jones / Forbidden Planet space opera vibes.

CLOTHING MAKES THE CREWMAN - Modeled from scratch in Blender. A lot of the details in the crew uniforms are overemphasized (the braid, the chest ribbing) to help them show up a little better given that the game is played from a third person perspective, so you won’t usually see these uniforms up close most of the time.

After a LOT of work to get the Metahuman head and body to play nice with the uniform and the animation system, I’ve managed to plug William and Nelson into the Unreal game engine and they now work as player controllable characters.

THE AWAY TEAM - William and Nelson make their first appearances in game at the OMEGA Forward Observational Station on Proxima Centauri b (Episode “First Contact”), all dressed up in their UNFA uniforms. Still some necessary tweaks to make to their outfits, but basically there. (If you note the checkerboard pattern on the floor, this is a direct visual callback to Kenneth Mayfield’s styling for the same map in the original game. Ignore the walls as I’ve just got placeholders up for the moment).

For Osai and Katya, I’ll be going through a similar modeling process, and making modifications to the uniforms to accommodate their differences in height, weight, and general physique. From there, it will be a process of integrating all the player-controlled characters and hooking them up to the UI. Following that, the roadmap will be to start developing the party formation AI, and then on to the fundamental skill system.