This week we began to focus on initial designs for our characters, character design is a key aspect of our GDDs as these player characters we design will be how we will communicate and interact with our game worlds. It is essential for me to be able to create good characters as my game’s minor focus will be on the story and narrative – these characters will be how the players relate and entangle themselves within this story. However, it is a key thing to note that good character design doesn’t always mean what looks the best – take “thomas was alone” for example.
So what makes for good character design? Characters should be recognisable – this is to ensure the player know’s who is who, making the story easily digestible, but that doesn’t mean making the story simple and boring. One way to make a character recognisable is through their silhouette, the most iconic video game characters are always identifiable by their silhouette – take Mario and Sonic for example.
So what makes for good character design? Characters should be recognisable – this is to ensure the player know’s who is who, making the story easily digestible, but that doesn’t mean making the story simple and boring. One way to make a character recognisable is through their silhouette, the most iconic video game characters are always identifiable by their silhouette – take Mario and Sonic for example.
Task 7 – Focalising Character
However, to start we were tasked with filling out this sheet and creating an early prototype of our character using simple 2D shapes to begin with, in order to give us a general idea of what our character would look like in the future.
These simple shapes that we used are reflected a certain way in the human eye (Shape language), small differences in each shape mean certain things whether it be emotions, properties, feelings etc.
Guest Speaker – jAKEDetonator
jAKE was definitely an the most interesting character among the guest speakers so far, he was very vocal and loud which was pretty refreshing, it feels good to know that although University is very serious and should be taken so – it is normal to just be yourself despite being in stressful situations. jAKE’s advice was very helpful for this project and for any anxiousness to do with being in the industry itself.
Task 8 – Collage
In order to help us get an overall feel/vibe of our game worlds, jAKE provided us with an absurdly large collection of magazines and newspapers to cut out and use to create a collage for our game. He told us to look for interesting patterns and designs in to use as textures for our collages – for my collage I looked for darker, grainy looking designs and patterns as I wanted to replicate an aged stone castle for the main antagonists lair.
