Kaski bestiary
The forest's animals, the stock and folk of other builds, drawn the way the villagers are: flat layers at the game's own scale, no outline, one soft form per layer and the scene's light in three bands. Each body is put together from its genes, which pick its masses and lengths, how its legs bend and what coat it wears, and then it is drawn flat to the side, the front or the back.
Four facings
Three ways to proportion it
Three ways to light it
Genes
Lengths are in metres, angles in degrees, coat patterns from 0 to 1. Copy puts the creature on the clipboard as JSON, to paste back in chat.
In the yard, at the villagers' scale
Thirty-four pixels to the metre, the game's own art scale, where a voxel is seventeen pixels and a villager stands about sixty. Everything wanders on its own clock and is drawn at ten frames a second, as the villagers are.
What changed from the first take
The first take drew rounded solids from a raised camera with an outline, which is the opposite of how the villagers are drawn. This one keeps the solids only as the genes' skeleton: each part is flattened into a layer, far legs and the far antler sit a shade back behind the barrel, near legs and the head lie over it, and each layer gets one broad soft form with creases where a shoulder, a haunch or a hump meets the body. The light comes from the hour, as on the villagers, and nothing is outlined.
A moose reads at this scale from five things together: a shoulder hump higher than the rump, legs longer than the barrel is deep and paler than it, a long head hanging low with an overhanging muzzle, the bell, and palms on the antlers. Shag on the hump and the mane breaks the top edge so the outline stops reading as a cut-out.
- Coats are genes too: a pale belly, a dark stripe down the back, spots, socks, and shag along the top and bottom edges.
- Folk are drawn with the villagers' own parts: the same body frame, arms, heads, hair, beards and wardrobe, at the engine's small, human and large size classes. Horns, longer ears, a tail and a second pair of arms are the only parts added.