Rebuilding the Nanny (work in progress)

If you’ve played The Cradle - Episode 01, you’ve met Valya, the Nanny: the night nurse of «Ласточка». She’s 2.5 metres of starved, stooped woman in a stained nurse’s coat, her head wound in swaddling cloth, torn open across a grin that runs from cheek to cheek.

She works in the game, but up close she never looked the way she does in my head. Her shoes were shapeless lumps, her hands looked like bare plastic, her stockings were smooth dark tubes, and her textures went soft as soon as you got near her. So I’ve started rebuilding her from scratch.

What’s new so far

• A real body under the clothes. The new Valya is built on an anatomical human base (MakeHuman’s free CC0 assets), then stretched and starved into her: a 2.5 m frame, arms that hang past her knees, long jointed fingers, knobbly knees, collarbones you could hang a coat on.
• Clothes that are actually clothes. Her coat is cloth-simulated, so it hangs and folds like old cotton instead of being sculpted on. The children’s grimy handprints at her hip are back, along with the wet run down her front.
• The face. The bandage is wound strip by strip around a real skull, torn across a mouth full of long, uneven teeth, with the eyes seeping through.
• Details from the original, done properly. The laddered stockings, the worn bar shoes with the strap across the instep, the cap with its faded red cross.
• 4K textures throughout, with waxy, dead-looking skin.

She’s built in a T-pose, which is the proper base for animating her. A few of the shots below are early test poses: in a doorway, coming down a corridor, peering under a ward bed, and lunging at you.

Still work in progress

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This is not what’s in the game yet, and it isn’t finished. There’s still a list: the under-the-bed shot hides too much of her face, her skirt misbehaves in some poses, her hands need more skin detail, and her stockings need to be darker and more matte. After that comes the big job of getting her game-ready: a lighter version that runs in the browser and on phones, her existing animations moved onto the new body, and some new ones I’m excited about.

Here’s where she is right now. Tell me what you think, and especially what scares you most. 👁️

You can play the original game now: https://0xkot.itch.io/the-cradle-episode-01

0xKOT, Encrypted Cat Games