Meet Edgar, a friendly ent-like forest creature I designed, modeled, and rigged as a player avatar for an unfinished VR game called “Big & Little”:

In this two-player asymmetric adventure game, players embody two unlikely allies of vastly different sizes who team up to solve puzzles and escape a fantastical realm using their complementary abilities.

Modeling workflow

I experimented with VR sculpting using Oculus Medium in my workflow for this character. I sculpted a rough base mesh from reference sketches before importing into Blender to retopologize. This really helped me get the proportions right on the first try!

Textured the model in InstaMAT and rigged using Blender and Rigify.

The arm vines and sprouts on its head and back are built from curves using geometry nodes.

Game design

This “big” player is 10m tall in the virtual world and specializes in manipulating the environment. The player’s abilities including bridging gaps with their arms so the little character to climb between platforms, and manipulating objects at a distance. Their movements are restricted along tracks with gates (hence the shackles) which the little player is able to manipulate using levers. The big player needs the little player to traverse the level past gates, but the little player also needs the big player’s assistance to traverse gaps and reach high places.

Asymmetric player mechanics reinforce the relative scales of the players (the big player is 5x the size of the smaller!) and encourage physical interactions between them. This experience of embodied scale is only possible in VR and furthers the game’s player experience goal of deepening the relationship between two people by exploring power dynamics through play, with specific focus on how those dynamics affect interactions between the two players and emotional changes when those dynamics are swapped.