Character Design
We started off the week by getting a quick recap over character design and within that we did some tasks to help get our ideas flowing which will be shown down below, while also having JAKe revisit us on our Thursday lesson where he took his time to talk to us individually and really get to know what our games were about while also making suggestions but understanding if that’s not how we envisioned our games to be.
Monday’s lesson
When starting to come up with characters it’s always a good idea to refresh your mind with what sort of characters you can see within games. For mine I have a deuteragonist which is you the player and then my other characters are NPC’s (non-playable characters).
Activity
Within our lesson we carried out a warm up activity to help us come up with our characters. Because I already had a slight idea for what I wanted my main character to be I was able to fill out the majority of the sheet. We did the right side first and then moved onto the left side where we got set the challenge of only using shapes and 3 colours to create our characters before starting this we went over the different type of shapes that can be used to give certain characters certain traits.
After reading about the certain shapes I decided to annotate the slide we were shown with the different shapes I saw within these characters as well as the traits that went along with them. I found that the shapes actually lined up well with the personality traits of the characters so this is definitely something for me to consider when thinking of my own characters and what secret shapes might be hidden within them.
I found that in the lesson I rushed my initial character so because I enjoyed this activity when I got home I decided to have another go at creating a character and found I was able to produce something quite unique. I found this also gave me hope that you can create characters from simple shapes and not to worry about creating something perfect first time.
When creating our characters these were some other elements that are key when designing
Next Steps
I’d say that my next steps from here is to start creating my mood boards for my characters and start looking at potential palettes which will suit the environment that they are in. Also consider starting to do some concept ideas for the characters within my game.
Update click here to see the start of my ideas.
Thursdays Lesson
On Thursdays afternoon lesson we had JAKe come back in to see us. Within this lesson he spent time going around everyone individually talking about their ideas and I was able to have a really nice conversation with him not only about my game idea but also about stuff that interested me as an artist, I found the conversation quite refreshing as it was nice to be able to talk to someone who was excited for what it was that I wanted to make and also suggesting ideas for me to consider. During the lesson we also made these collages and when speaking to JAKe I mentioned that the term ‘masking’ within autistic women really stood out to me and that’s when he pointed to my collage as subconsciously I had got a masked person within my collage. I really enjoyed meeting and getting to see what JAKe does as he made it seem possible to make it within the industry.