After my peer presentation I wanted my priority focus to be on creating concept art. I decided to start with designing the main character, the small, playful spirit which the player controls through the levels. I wanted the character to be contained within a spherical orb still, as I still want to have them roll through the levels by default as their main tool of traversal.
I sketched this first rough design as a starter, heavily inspired by the Pokemon Reuniclus’ design. The cube in the background is intended to be some sort of multi-coloured four-dimensional object , inspired by the tesseract in Fez.
A quick experiment with colours made me go with contrasting colours of orange and blue for the character and the orb surrounding it respectively. I also added some shifting colours and a mosaic effect for the cube.
However, I felt that this looked too cluttered, and the sketch’s neutral expression did not portray the youthful and playful nature of the spirit.
I got the time to move this drawing to Clip Studio Paint, and did some clean lines over the character. I also removed the cube in the back to avoid clutter, and added some shading and shadows:
I then drew up a concept for the God of Friction. I had already come up with a basic character idea as discussed in a previous post, essentially a slick and friendly exterior hiding pent-up anger. Coincidentally I had recently watched a video on YouTube on gauge blocks, essentially metal blocks machined to extremely high precision with surfaces so flat they can stick together when enough pressure and friction is applied between the two. Their dual twisting nature was naturally very appealing for this two-face character, so I chose for a head made of two metallic blocks that may twist and turn.
I wanted to continue this theme into the body so I opted for a robe that sort of looks like a suit jacket, tattered and emitting dust from the stones or blocks that grind against eachother underneath. However, I thought the ripped look was too similar to the Lord of Gravity’s design, so I cleaned it up a bit:
Environment Art
Rooftop Plazas
My next idea for an environment for a level was on a set of rooftops in a city, where a player could jump between them and perhaps go through chutes or vents as part of gameplay. To ensure there was a large amount of objects I opted to have a rooftop plaza section with things like chairs, tables, and maybe even a covered swimming pool the player and objects can bounce on.
This started as a very basic sketch but I gave it another go with Clip Studio’s perspective tool:
This was much better. I then added some colours, being inspired by some of the work by Joshua Davis I and other 2000’s graphic designers I had seen before:
I wanted to make some of the outlines more clean but couldnt decide how much to add, as I wanted the outlines to not be too intrusive. I decided to keep my sketch layer at a low opacity and keep my clean outlines in a lighter colour:
This looked really nice. All I added after that was some “collage work” by adding in some free stock photos from Google:
Finally I used a a gradient map to give the shadows a more greenish tinge for a stylised look:
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