ArtCraft Entertainment have concluded what they’ve been calling Hunger Week with the reveal of the Hell Cat creature, and an explanation of how The Hunger — one of the core game mechanics in Crowfall — decays and ultimately consumes the creature.

First up, we took a base creature. We started with a Sabretooth tiger; it seemed like a creature that would be interesting to fight even in Spring, before the onset of the Hunger. (Oddly enough, the original thought was to make it a wolf, but we decided to change it to a cat and for a few months we kept calling the hell cat a “demon dog,” in spite of the fact that there was absolutely NOTHING canine about it.)

Once we had the base concept locked, we broke the “Hunger” effect into stages. We wanted to sell the idea that the Hunger spreads like a disease, and it happens over time — twisting and corrupting a creature so that, by the onset of Winter, it becomes unrecognizable.

Once we had the various stages in mind, we jumped to the Winter and created a high-res image. The goal here was to visualize the musculature and Hunger effects in detail.

That image was then used to create a high polygon model, a 3D sculpt of the cat in all his (her?) glory. After modelling, we textured (painted) her — including lighting, diffusion and reflection layers. The model was then rigged with an internal skeleton, and animated.

Click on through to see the video of the animated Hell Cat, and to see some additional artwork of it.

This has been a heavy week for Crowfall-related information, has it not?