Character Overview:
Bargaining is one of the four Griefs the player must confront. Bargaining is heavy and cunning – a powerful ogre, hoarding the lives of the living and the dead. Bargaining is, at its core, deceptive and fraudulant, always wanting more and doing anything in its power to achieve it.

What is Bargaining?

Bargaining is the third stage of the 5 stages of grief and is widely regarded as a defense mechanism or pain management strategy. It is defined as the feeling of helplessness following a traumatic event that can lead to a person making deals with themselves or others, particularly higher powers, in order to feel better or change the outcome of a loss.

Design Process

When I though of bargaining my first thought was “conman” or something along those lines, as well as the usual connotations that bargaining has outside of the emotional grief sense which centers around wealth and trade. I liked this idea a lot however I had to make sure I kept a thin line between bargaining and the concept of greed as to not stray from the message of grief, this was surprisingly difficult to do and I had to be very mindful. I thought about royalty and kingship as I believe that was the best way to capture wealth in this way, I then created a collage of character designs that were most related to my idea.

I primarily looked at existing concept art centred around trolls and ogres but felt as though something was lacking – it wasn’t really tying into grief and death so I looked at typical representations of the Grim Reaper and its role as a collector of souls. Breaking down the visuals of the Grim Reaper its most trademark features were the dark robes and scythe, which would be easy to incorporate into any design.

Concept Sketches

I settled on the sketch design with royal robes as I believed it best fit the idea I was going for, mixing the concept of wealth with slick robes/cloth, gold chains/braces and jewels with the executioner style pointed hood and scythe.

Scythes