During my internship at the game studio Bongfish, I had the opportunity to work on their new game Chefs Arena, which is a arena brawler where two teams of up to two players need to gather ingredients in an arena in order to cook various dishes for a king and score points to win the match. Meanwhile the players have to constantly fight against several creatures in the arena as well as the enemy team.
The game has a medieval theming, so most of the characters and maps resemble this kind of aesthetic. My job mainly was to create the 3D-models for various characters in the game.
For most of the characters I worked on, I was given artwork to use as a reference for creating the 3D-models. I always started with some front and sideview sketches of the character and then blocked out and sculpted the basemesh. Then I retopologized the model and worked on the characters clothes and accessories. The ultimate goal of the game is to cook dishes for the King, so most of the playable characters wear some kind of appron.
With the model finished I textured the characters in Substance Painter. I wanted to give them a hand-painted almost cartoony look. For the faces of the characters we decided to use 2D-textures that I painted directly onto the character. After that the characters where animated and implemented into the game.
I primarily worked on playable characters, including the Squire, a small, knight-like figure, the Blue Guy, a large, round character and the Jester, for whom I had the opportunity to create the design concept. I also did the 3D-model for the King, a non-playable character who serves as a central figure on each of the game’s maps. Since the King doesn‘t move around in the arena and only sits at a table, it was possible to give him drastically different proportions compared to the player characters.
