I’m interested in creating a collection of game assets for a race/class fantasy RPG system as in games like Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft. But instead of elves and dwarves, I want to do anthro animals. If you’ve never seen a race/class system before, it means you combine a race, like fox, falcon, turtle, with a jobclass, like knight, wizard, ninja, so you can play as a fox knight, fox wizard, fox ninja, falcon knight, falcon wizard, falcon ninja, turtle knight, turtle wizard, turtle ninja. But you would generally have a dozen or so races and classes to choose from.
I like designing anthro characters because I can use a bunch of visually distinctive body types, like a leggy rabbit or a long armed hawk. But this makes it a challenge to share things between different models. For example, say I make an animation for the fox knight of swinging a sword and blocking with a shield, I don’t want to make that animation again from scratch each time I do a new race of knight. I’m thinking that I can probably fit the many races into a few distinct groups, for example, a frog and a rabbit and a heron should be able to use the same long-legged archetype.
If anyone has any thoughts or tips about doing a project like this, I would really appreciate it.