Researching Characters

Robot (First Design)

This wasn’t the first time I worked on a robot design, as I had created a robot for a game called Rogue Robots.

For my robot design, I used a Pinterest board to get inspiration for my robot character. As you can see, I chose some reference images based on futuristic robot designs.

This was my initial design for my robot.

One criticism that I got for the robot design is that the robot, which the player kills continuously throughout the game, was too cute. I agreed with this and, but I didn’t know where I kept the original drawing of the robot, so I decided to make a new one. I also had a one-on-one with my teacher, Vanissa, who suggested I looked at shape language.

Robot (2nd design)

I started working on the second robot design near Christmas time, making sure to use some of the reference photos from the Pinterest board to come up with an overall design.

This design is a lot more boxy, I made sure that the eyes were smaller, and a lot more meaner than the original. I showed it to the course Discord and someone asked why it was mad.

I said that my first attempt at the robot looked too innocent, and they said that it looked innocent and cute, but now mad.

I also showed it to another friend on Discord, and we had a discussion about the robot, and they said that “something more pointy would read better for your robots.” I also had a look at shape language, and I adapted my robot’s design to be more pointy, reducing some of the roundedness that I had given it.

I liked this design as it looks more meaner compared to the previous attempts at making an antagonist robot.

At this stage, I scanned the drawing I had so far and transferred it to Procreate, using the original drawing as a tracing for the new one.

As well as flipping the mouth. >:)

I continued to seek feedback from the course Discord and I got this feedback from Joseph.

At this point, I’d also made an alternative design of my robots, giving it a less old color scheme, replacing the grey body with white, and I also added a turtleneck sweater. This wasn’t something I researched, It was something I thought of quickly and added to the character because I thought it would add style.

This what what I got in response:

I’d also changed the face, based on Joeseph’s feedback, removing the mouth to give a more authentic robotic look.

And then I modified the replaced the second character with one that looks similar to the first character, but with the turtleneck.

And then I got some more feedback:

I showed my robot designs to my brother and he also gave some advice as to the art. He suggested adding a shadow to show that the robot was at an angle.

After some more revisions, this is the design I’ve got currently. I decided to merge the second designs turtleneck with the first one for simplicity; once I had a base design complete, I could then make alternative designs from there.

One thing I also took from the second design were the black lines covering much of the robots. I thought that would look cool for the first robot.

I also got some feedback from my brother on the issue of perspective.

This is what I came up with:

But eventually, I decided to remove it as it didn’t made any sense with respect to my game.

Finally, I did what I set out to do in the first few weeks, I attempted to make my robot look like a character from the Mixels TV cartoon.

Cut Content

I also made a player character for the game, but I cut it from the game as I found it to be too abstract. You can find more art for this character here: https://year2.wsagames.com/sc18g23/2024/12/30/character-design-week-4/