Mechanatural Game Development

This is a high-poly character I got as far as texturing. 

I learned a lot from this because there are some minor aspects of the face that don't render well, especially around the eyes and nose. I was really proud of the results I got using the normal map to get good leather and skin texture though. I also liked that I was able to avoid issues where the textures on the nose and chin of a model gets stretch out by wrapping the skin around the model (vanilla Skyrim faces, for example). To keep this from happening I first unwrapped the skin from the face, then scaled the regions of the UV map representing the faces at the tip of the nose up slightly, then enlarged the region being scaled up by a ring of faces and repeated this until the faces representing the nose of the skin were larger relative to the faces they would be mapped to than the rest of the face, and moreso closer to the tip. This meant that there was more detail from the skin over each face at the tip of the nose and chin than elsewhere, so when the engine finished stretching the skin over the face, it didn't look stretched.

A horror creature I created that doesn't quite fit most fantasy settings (though I think it might be a good way of encouraging players to be afraid of deep water) is this thing that I think of as the sum of all nightmares. I had an idea that something was creepier if it seemed like its last common ancestor with humans would have been farther away on our evolutionary family tree. Spiders. Centipedes. Squids. You get the idea. This took that to an extreme. It is symmetrical from top to bottom, as well as from left to right, with the top legs simply curved down to touch the floor. It is also almost symmetrical from back to front. 

It would swim by beating its legs and tail rhythmically against the water. If fully realized in a game, it could also walk in a spider-like fashion as shown in this picture, and could climb vertical tunnels smaller than the diameter of its legs by pushing its legs against the walls of the shaft in all directions. I made an animated version that walked and attacked but didn't notice until it was too late that one of the vertexes of a leg hadn't been weighted properly when I rigged it so it was left behind as the creature moved, and haven't got around to fixing it since it isn't a high priority.