Hearts Medicine tells the story of Allison Heart as an intern in Little Creek Hospital. Hearts Medicine is a casual time management game set in a hospital. The levels are inbetween cutscenes about everything that happens in and around the life of Allison.

Hearts Medicine 2 (HM2) was the first project I worked on when after joining Blue Giraffe. The game was already a few months in production. For HM2 I was tasked to model and rig new characters in 3Ds Max using biped, and to make animations for all the characters in the game.

Hearts Medicine 2 Time To Heal

The Hearts Medicine series uses an inhouse developed 2D game engine, so I also had to learn a new workflow that was already established. This workflow was a fair bit of manual work. First the renders needed to be copied into photoshop; then every render needed to be processed by an Action; then the renders needed to be copied to the correct SVN folder; and then to be imported in the engine assets list. After a while I learned this was rather cumbersome and I slowly began making scripts in maxscript to automate the steps for getting the renders to the engine. Over time this grew into a tool that made a manual process of a few minutes into a matter of seconds in one click. I'm still very proud of this tool and it was super interesting to work with maxscript and automate the boring stuff. The main lesson I learned form this is that there is always something that could use automation.

Hearts Medicine 3 Hospital Heat

For Hearts Medicine 3 (HM3) there were a few new characters introduced, I got to implement the story to the game, and I made a new tool for 3Ds Max where we could could make more diverse faces for our characters. For HM2 we used dedicated textures for each expression we needed. The tool I made was using seperate texture layers for skin, eyes, left and right eyebrows, and the mouth. These textures where combined in the material and I made a rig that could move every seperate layers. This way we had more granular controls, and we could make more diverse faces for the characters.

Hearts Medicine 4 Doctors Oath

For Hearts Medicine 4 (HM4) there were a even more new characters. The animation tools were mostly chrystalized and just needed a few tweaks here and there. My duties for HM4 were more or less the same as for HM3. My role for story implementation got a bit bigger and more involved. As I was getting a lot more familiar with the engine and its inner workings, I was able to make even elaborate sequences for the episodes cliffhangers.

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