Boss Monster Designs

Here are my boss monster designs, i stuck with the typical dragon for one, the dragon design itself is pretty standard but it was an interesting sketch. I didn't bother with silhouettes for these i just sketched out the designs and worked them up. I think the dragon turned out pretty well.

The other monster is called Sawtooth and takes the place of Baron Nashor from League of legends. It is a burrowing monster that inhabits the moon where the arena is held. it's an odd character but it accomplishes the dangerous large monster vibe.

Neutral Monster Designs

Here are my neutral monster designs, the boss monsters will be separate since they will be larger. The first one The Gast is a monster that i though might look a little too sentient, i wanted these too look like alien animals or creatures that are vicious and aren't some kind of being that would be considered for a character.

 The Lasher is a different version of one of the monster silhouettes, i think it could have been better it i had time to refine it.

I quite like how the Carrion came out, a lot better than i had in my head. I was trying to use a similar formula to League of legends monsters, a flying monster was needed. 

The Golem is probably my favorite, i didn't like any of my other silhouettes so i looked back at some of my old character silhouettes and thought this one which was a stand out at the time would be a good monster. League of legends has golems so i thought i would make my own.

Next are the boss monsters, there is traditionally a Dragon and something else, i think i might do a dragon too as i have never really tried my hand at drawing them. As for the other monster i may look back at some of my animal research and maybe draw some ideas from them.

Mae: The Biomancer Lore

Name: Mae

Race: Plant Human Hybrid

Home: Earth

Time: 2054

Dimension: Prime

Mae was a Bio-Technician; she worked with various types of bacteria, testing, synthesising, mixing, extracting and so on day in and day out trying to find uses for all the kinds of experiments she conducted. She was assigned a shipment of new materials to test with, they came in hazardous boxes, unusual considering what she usually worked with. These new materials where various biological extracts, some poisonous and some had been by-products of testing elsewhere.

Weeks went by and Mae had begun working through her new specimens, combining them, testing them and changing them, most tests resulted in either more toxic chemicals or new biological formations that had no real use. One project she had previous set aside one day showed promise, it had grown. A concoction of enzymes, biochemical’s and hybrid extracts, this small dish of matter should not have grown.

Mae started testing this substance to see what it had become and why. During one of her tests she was handling a container of the new biochemical the substance in the container rapidly grew in size. This unexpected reaction caught Mae by surprise, as she reeled the substance fell out of the container and landed on her right hand. Heavily gloved she thought nothing of it and began to walk to the bin to dispose of her gloves. As she approached, the substance began to creep through her glove, seeping into her skin, burning at first and then pulsing. She tried to pull off the glove but it had begun to fuse to her skin, panicking she rushed to the sink to wash it off, the water removed the excess substance but revealed the green veined rough skin bellow beginning to change. Rushed to quarantine she could see her arm growing, changing into something hard, she could still move it and could still feel it but it wasn’t skin any longer. Mae passed out. When she awoke she was shocked to find herself in white sterile box room and her right hand fully transformed into branching wooden fist.

Mae had been turned from a scientist into a subject, tests were conducted on her, the other scientists could not harvest anything from her arm, the wood was harder than any naturally growing tree bark. Whenever the scientist tried anything extensive her arm would react and grow as if protecting her. As time went on and the scientist could not help Mae she began to change further, her skin began to change too. Her biology was changing, this substance had made her some mixture of flesh and plant. Her skin eroded things on touch, she could produce biochemical’s and use them for various things.

Mae disappeared from the labs, the scientists have no idea where she went. The Warden however knew exactly where this new Biomancer belonged.

Final Characters

Figured i'd do this to help keep track. These are my 5 chosen characters for my project, Lodus looks a little out of place but i think he helps sell that this game wouldn't just house standard humans.

Ability Set Character: Biomancer

Here is my final character, the Biomancer, she currently has no name, no doubt i will come up with one when i write her lore page. The Biomancer turned out a lot differently than i first thought it would, the initial idea was to have some sort of scientist who threw chemical casks and through some experiment had turned their arm into some kind of anthropomorphic wood weapon. However i like how she turned out, i can still work with the scientist aspect with maybe that coat having been a lab coat and after some event she's becoming half plant. Kind of sounds a close to the Batman villain Poison Ivy but i can make her my own. 

Next i will create her lore to finalize her idea and then move onto the ability sets for all the characters before polishing them up with colour, lighting and some detail.

Ability Set Character Development Thumbnails

Here are the work ups for the Ability Set character thumbnails. They're pretty rushed but they get the job done, i know for a fact now that i do not want to use the symbiote character, all the designs are really just various blobs with tentacles. They really don't make for interesting character designs, i can tell that sketching them for storyboards would be a nightmare as well.

I have decided to go with the Biomancer character and chose thumbnail 1. I got some peer feedback on the Hades ones but ultimately i don't feel like they represent the character well and he doesn't haven anything going for him visually, there is really nothing more to him at the moment than him being some kind of monster.

I like Biomancer 1 because of the interesting mix and transition between plant and human.

Ability Set Character Silhouettes

Took me a while but here are the silhouettes for my chosen 3 ability set characters, The Biomancer, the Symbiote and Hades, not in the traditional sense. I need to work up the values for these before choosing which character to take as my final choice but i think it's definitely coming down to the Biomancer and Hades. 

Out of the Biomancer silhouettes i like 1 and 2, i have ideas for those characters and they match my initial idea of the character, i'm quite glad i left the gender of the character open. Although the design flow for abilities is a little awkward this way i did find that using the abilities first leaves for more open interpretation of the character.

The Symbiote is an odd one, again 1 and 2 and the ones i find interesting out of these but compared to some silhouettes of the other characters i just don't find this one as appealing.

I always pictured the Hades character as a tanky brute tearing through armies, these silhouettes don't quite reflect that but they did yield some interesting looking characters, 3 is a standout, maybe because of the more traditional Greek shapes used, i can work with that though in the lore if i chose him. 4 and 5 are quite interesting as well in their own ways. 

Next will be work ups and finalization.

Ability set character development

Moving onto the ability set characters I've realized i can't really fully establish how the characters abilities will look without knowing how the character itself looks. This is a major flaw in designing from this method, the abilities can only go so far, this is not to say that coming up with game play ideas first won't result in better ability sets but when designing visually it would appear at this stage this direction doesn't flow as well as the others.

As for which Ability set characters to take forward i have chosen to go with The Biomancer, The symbiote and Hades. I feel these characters visually rich sets of descriptors. Following my process i will create silhouettes to develop these characters.

Lodus Design

So here is Lodus, the armour encased beetle warrior alien...guy....with a sword. So yea, i think he turned out ok, better than the silhouette developments at least, i took my favourite parts from them and merged them with some ideas of how i originally saw him in my head. Silhouettes were probably not the best way to go about designing a character like this. I think they helped define his shapes and values but for his design i would have liked to do more sketch work. When finalized i'll be adding some carapace textures to him which will help illustrate what his armour is made of.

Lore characters development

Here are the development drawing for my lore character silhouettes, since resuming the work on this project i seemed to work on creating characters a little differently, i went back to the old way i was comfortable with and then when it came to working up these silhouettes again i forgot how i did it. 

The Targe silhouettes have been developed more sketchy as i forgot to use values to speed up the process.

Norah thumbnails are simpler and just use values, this method is quicker and i really need to get as much done as fast as possible . Looking at these i quite like 2 and 3, i think they have the most interesting aspects and values.

Lodus has proven to be a difficult character to create, i would have liked to do a lot more observational drawing of beetles and such and have worked on him more consistently, it was something i did for part of a project last year but flipping back and forth between projects has made it hard to retain a work process. These haven't been as good as i hoped by i do quite like 1 and 5.

Lore Drafts 2

I decided to take a little break from the design drawings as i was getting a little sluggish, i figured changing it up would help me get my work speed back up. 

So i decided to carry on working on my lore pages. The next step was to narrow them down from 5 to 3, i then took my chosen 3 lore pages, which are shown bellow, and refined and expanded upon them. Some of my character lore pages needed changing, some needed expanding as they were a little short compared to other pages.

I chose Endrea as when i had some friends look over my 5 first draft lore pages Endrea was one that stood out. The prospect of her gaining royal status in a new world was interesting, i also like that she isn't strictly human, an issue I've had with my design characters so far.

Lodus was an instant favourite of mine, i think as a character he could have some great visual aspects. I like Lodus' story too, i also have some ideas about his abilities which make him all the more appealing to me in the long run. This page is one of the ones that i needed to expand, i liked what was there but there was very little compared to the other character pages.

I chose Targe because of how fleshed out and grounded the lore is, i find him similar to one of my design character as well. I don't know if this character will be chosen over the design character.


EDIT*  unpublished post

Lore character Silhouettes

Here are the silhouettes for my chosen lore characters, Norah, Targe and Lodus. Norah and Targe sils have been posted before with some research so i tidied them up and posted them again all together. Targe likely wont be used as his lore has been turned into Serge's. 

From Norah's silhouettes i am liking 2 and 3, the other just don't stand out as much at the moment.

Targe was always an interesting character and his silhouettes where interesting, some were a little confusing but i liked where they where going. I think having Lore to draw from does really help the art process and when writing lore for the design characters i did kind of have to make up my own story rather than have the story come from the character. 

Lodus was one of my favourite lore characters, i loved the story and the imagery that came from it. The silhouettes where a little difficult  i was trying to use the beetles imagery i gathered to incorporate some visual aspects into them but most of the easily distinguishable parts were horns and appendage spikes. Putting spikes on everything is kind of bad practice when creating silhouettes.

Design Characters Ability Sets

 Here are the ability sets for my 3 design characters. I'm going to get up to this point with the Lore character designs before i start work on the storyboards, i know i'm going to struggle with them so i'm going to try and get other work out of the way first.

These will also be displayed properly like the first ability sets i created.

Merci Ability Set
Passive Helping hand	Every 5th auto attack Merci lands on an enemy champion causes Merci to fire 2 additional shots at the enemy.
Ability (1) Quadra Shot	This ability is a line skillshot that fires off 4 gunshots dealing physical damage to the first enemy hit.
Ability (2) Vision filter	This ability has 2 parts. The active allows Merci to reveal an area of the fog of war in target direction. When this ability is not on cooldown Merci reduces the armour of nearby enemies in front of her by 5%.
Ability (3) Searing Knife	This ability causes the player to throw a super heated blade in a target direction. If the blade connects with an enemy it deals light magic damage equal to a percentage of the enemies maximum health and applies a small damage over time debuff for a few seconds.
Ultimate Ability Quick Draw	This ability when activated causes Merci’s bionic arms to target the two closest enemies for 10 seconds. The arm deal auto attack damage.

Serge Ability Set
Passive	Landing hits on an enemy with Scrap Hail grants Serge passive armour for 4 seconds. Scaling with level.
Ability (1) Crushing Blow	Serge swings Scrap Hail and launches it in a line dealing physical damage to each enemy it passes through and deals damage on the return.
Ability (2) Re-breather	Activating this ability will remove any stat debuff currently afflicting Serge and reduce the duration of any stat debuff applied to him for the next 5 seconds. If this ability is not on cooldown, any enemy killed by a ability will grant Serge a small amount of health.
Ability (3)	Serge throws out Scrap Hail dealing damage in a small area and leaves  a small slowing area behind.
Ultimate Ability Scrap Hail	Activating this ability will cause Serge to swing Scrap Hail around his head dealing physical damage in a area around him. Reactivating this ability will cause Serge to slam Scrap Hail into the ground anywhere in a moderate distance around Serge. Hitting an enemy will knock them back, an enemy cannot be knocked back more than once but will still take damage from each hit.

Linn Ability Set
Passive	Hitting an enemy with an auto attack decreases their armour by a % each hit stacking 3 times. % scales with Player Level.
Ability (1) Blow Back	This ability causes Linn to dash a short distance landing a ferocious punch that knocks back the enemy. The punch can be charged up to deal extra damage and knocking the enemy back further. Charging the punch reduces Linns movement speed.
Ability (2) Thundering Blows	This ability causes Linn to land stunning punch onto an enemy and then following up with a flurry of blows at a short range in front of her dealing additional physical damage. Landing the additional blows increases Linns attack speed for 3 seconds.
Ability (3) Thrusting Kick	Linn dashes in a target direction landing a powerful kick dealing moderate physical damage and granting a small movement speed buff to Linn for 2 seconds if the kick lands on an enemy.
Ultimate Ability Full Contact	Linn raises her arms and punches the ground with all the strength shattering the ground around her dealing damage in the area and knocking up all enemies hit.

Design Character Lore

From my final design character i have chosen character 1, 2 and 5. I written up lore for each of them that i'm quite happy with. They may be refined a little and will then be put onto a display format.

Name: Merci

Race: Human Female

Home: Earth

Time: 2095

Dimension: Prime

Merci was a proud police officer in New York in 2087, she served tirelessly in cleaning up a depraved city. New York had never been the shining example of a city it was touted as being and it only got worse over the decades. Merci rose through the ranks of the police service but was always short of the greatness she knew she deserved.

One night on patrol with her partner Clarion they came across a suspicious warehouse, clearly inhabited when it shouldn't have been. Investigating it they found a congregation of gang leaders, these where some of the most feared people in New York, and the city was no stranger to dangerous gangs. Clarion called it in and before the meeting had ended the police from all around the city had converged on the location. As police moved on the warehouse it became clear this meeting wasn't just a meeting of gang leaders, it was a plot.

Bombs went off around the city, disorientated the police where fired upon by various gang members, caught by surprise Merci and the rest of the police force fought off as many gang members as they could as they fell back to help the city. This was the start of the New York war, a clash between the combined gangs of the city and the police force as the gangs attempted to eradicate everyone in their way. Their plot was to seize control of the city and turn it into the capital of crime syndicates led by Garek Vancil, a dangerous man who had united the gangs not through bribes, not through power or number but through respect, the most powerful tool.

This was a intercity war that raged for years, any help from the outside was usurped by Gareks gangs and connections in other cities. It was this war that brought out the greatness Merci had inside her, working alone after Clarion had gone missing, presumed dead at the hands of Garek. Merci found where Garek was living, a high city tower, unremarkable in its looks from the outside, but inside was a fortress. Merci Entered and brought down almost half of the guards before Garek was even aware of her, fueled and covered in weapons she charged upward.

Merci took down Garek single-handedly from inside his own tower. The city was hers to control if she wanted it but instead dismantled the gangs and ended the war that had ruined her city. Taking control of the new New York police force she organised the rebuilding of the city before being pulled to Purgatory by the Warden. Once there she adapted to the new world as she did to New York, proved herself and created a formidable police force of her own to help enforce order upon the various creatures of this new world.

For this character i adapted the lore from one of my lore page character called Targe, they were pretty similar so i figured there would be no point having characters so similar. I actually prefer it this way and it saves time.

Name: Serge

Race: Human male

Home: Earth

Time: 2349

Dimension: Alternate

Serge was like any average man, worked hard, had his passions and interests, it just so happened that living in a gigantic toxic scrap yard gave him useful interests. Serge created tools out of parts and sold them, the world as it was now was more like a graveyard. Wars, social collapse, economic collapse, he world was still there but there was no place for greed in hell.

One day his scrap yard community was lay siege upon by a large army of raiders, scavengers and mutants. Serge was not a weak man and armed his fellow people with what weapons and defensive tools so that he could to try and stave off the attack. He and the people were not fighters, but they were survivors. Serge and the scrap yard citizens fought crudely but fiercely, even so most were torn apart. The community was left with nothing once again. Serge lost his family but found his purpose.

Serge created a new protective mask, his previous breather was damaged in the fight, with this helmet granting him clean air to breath and clear vision he picked up the weapon that had served him so well in his fight. A long chain pulled loose with a large chunk of concrete on the end was his barbaric weapon of choice. Swinging this weapon he named “Scrap Hail” he tore through camps of raiders wiping out the psychos that had killed his family.

Once he was satisfied he returned to the scrap yard to help rebuild his community. Stories of Serge travelled the lands, his legend became known as “The Scrap Knight” a vengeful warrior swinging a huge flail to fell his enemies. People from all around sought out the scrap yard and the protection Serge offered.

Once the Warden pulled Serge to Purgatory, he didn’t change much, a peaceful man when not provoked and a savage warrior still swinging “Scrap Hail” into enemies’ faces when needed.

Name: Linn

Race: Human Female

Home: Earth

Time: 2023

Dimension: Prime

Linn was a professional kickboxing champion, she worked her way up from the amateur scene into the big leagues. Linn was always strong willed and didn’t like being told she couldn’t do something, her brother saying “you fight like a girl” when she was younger is what pushed her to start kickboxing. This wouldn’t phase most people but Linn was stubborn that way. Linn climbed to the top and was the longest reigning champion until she too was pulled to Purgatory by the Warden.

Linn came to the world frightened and confused, it took her time to assimilate to this new world and life on it. Eventually she found her place and learned how the planet and the Arena worked. When she was finally summoned to fight in the arena she took up the challenge, she wanted to be the champion here too. This however was a whole new challenge, she was a mere human kick boxer up against people with weapons, aliens with huge physiology and monsters with fearsome power.

During Linn’s very first arena match she came across a creature larger than herself, a brawler too it sneered at her almost mocking her. Linn did not back down and engaged the creature. Fighting the creature proved painful for Linn, her blows seemed to hurt her more than him. The two connected punches fist to fist, the creatures’ thunderous blow shattered her arm. She was pulled from the arena.

Linn was crippled, she couldn’t fight and she was no use to the Warden. She knew how this world worked, she knew she would be left to the slums as all of the weak are on this planet. Linn however was stubborn after all, she did not accept this, she travelled the planet looking for a way to fix her arm, she did not find it, what she did find though was an alien in a far city of the planet. This alien knew human anatomy, it may have been considered a doctor or a mechanic or some parts of both. This alien would give Linn a new arm, a stronger arm and in return she would pay him with some of her winnings for as long as one of them lived.

Linn gained her new bionic arm, a mixture of metals and mechanics covered by tough materials connected to her nervous system so she could feel. She was impressed and had her other arm removed in favour of this upgrade as well. Fitted with new powerful arms and a fighting suit to reinforce her body Linn proved her worth to the Warden and regained access to the Arena with new strength. She now enters each Arena fight hoping to come across the creature that crushed her arm so long ago.

Preliminary Final Design Characters

These are all of my preliminary design characters, they should have been complete a good long while ago but here they are. I will chose 3 from these 5 before continuing them. Once i have chosen i will create lore drafts for the chosen designs. Once the lore for each character is finalized i will move onto the ability work ups. I will create ability mocks for each character, finalize them and then finish polishing up each aspect, giving colour and lighting to the character art, presenting the lore pages and drawing the storyboards to illustrate the  character ability sets. After that i will move onto the lore characters, or if i'm a little tired of them i'll work on the monster designs which shouldn't take long.

Character 5 Development

Here are my character 5 silhouettes worked up, i just stuck to doing values as i need to do the work quick. I think this method still works, it's faster and although it doesn't convey as much detail i think it helps distinguished the character without visual noise getting in the way. After doing this number 3 and 4 still stuck out to me, i decided to with number 3. It's a hard choice to describe, but the arms on this one i really like, they're not the overly sized mechanical ones from the original idea but i see them as mechanical with material over them to make them look like equipment. Simple and powerful, i thought they would convey, along with he pose, an air of power and confidence for the character.

This is the final workup of the character, she didn't change as much as other designs since the silhouettes had less detail but i really like how she turned out. The arms are mechanical and attached to her but covered by tough material.

Character 5 Silhouettes

These are my character silhouettes for design character 5, she is all about the arms. I actually forgot to include the original design but she's on here somewhere, she was actually my first character work up. Out of these i really like, 1, 3 and 3. 1 is pretty close to the original, i like 3 because of it's simplicity and i like 4 because the arms look kind of crude and bulky, good for a bruiser character.

I always liked the female with large arms look but was made a little unsure whether i should continue with the character after Riot games released a character shortly after i created mine with this same motif.

http://riot-web-static.s3.amazonaws.com/images/news/December_2012/2012_12_18_Vi_Release_Bundle/Vi_Splash.jpg

This is Vi, a character released for League of legends in january. I really like her character in the game and may find it hard to create min dissimilar to her in game play.

Design Character 3

Just realised i never put this character up. I did her a good few weeks ago when i was trying to create characters from weapon ideas and characters from different time periods, this one was obviously from the pirate era. I didn't do silhouettes for this i instead created some weapons which really kind of sucked for the most part, i enjoyed drawing her though. 

Design Character 4 Development

Very little time left now, i haven't done work on this project in a good few weeks as i was finishing off my other projects. Now that i'm working on this again i can buckle down and get as much work done as possible. I only have till Thursday to get this done so i'm working like mad. Frankly it will be a miracle if i get it done. Anyway here is my fourth character design, i have part of him done a while ago but I've finally finished the concepts and final work up for this character. I've been over this a few times but these characters   will be whittled down to my chosen 3 so these aren't necessarily the final characters, although not much more design work will be done on them, any additional work will be polish, colour and lighting.

These are the silhouettes i came up with for the robot legs character. The first one is the original silhouette. From these i silhouettes alone i think 1 and 2 are the weakest.

After that i worked the silhouettes up into these. I think the legs from number 3 and 5 are the most interesting but the body of 3 doesn't work with the legs. I like the body of 4, the general bad ass guy who seems right unhappy your looking at his legs. From here i took my favorite bits to create the final character.

Here is the final character, he doesn't have a name yet but i gave him the amputee war veteran thing. I think he could be an interesting character but he takes a long time to draw.

Neutral monster designs

So another part of my project is to create some neutral monster designs for this game, I've covered previously what the monsters are and what function they provide in the game world. I've created some silhouettes to get my monsters started since i have very little time left i'm getting work done on this project whenever i can. 

The structure for these monster is going to be like this, since in other games like this monster camps work by having 1 larger monster at a camp which holds a "buff" and then has smaller monsters which are there to make the camp harder and give XP and Gold. The structure therefore for my game is going to be having the large monster for each camp designed as if it is a creature taken from another world and then small robots (smaller minions) which i will design will essentially contain the monsters to these camps. 

Out of these 8 the ones i find the most interesting are 2,4,5 and 8.

Weapons Research

For this next character i'm going to mix it up a bit and design the character based off weapon designs, this was a method i looked into at the start of my project when looking at how developers like Riot games create their characters. I never made a specific area that would be based off this method so i makes sense to implement it as a trial method during my visual design section.

So far i have been designing character concepts and adding a weapon i thought looked appropriate, i never put that much thought into the weapons as they were pretty much just window dressing giving a some visual cues. The weapons would be more fleshed out in the final concept anyway but this method may yield some interesting results and will be a nice change in the meantime.

So first i gathered a bunch of images showing weapons from various cultures and time periods, i got a historical warriors book of a tutor a while back which made me think of looking at more historical weapons opposed to modern, it also seemed more appropriate because my characters are supposed to be warriors of varying degrees pulled from their worlds and times.

The character i am creating now that this weapon will inspire is also intended to be a historical character, she started off as a kind of pirate but i don't want to constrain it to just a pirate as pirates often look kind of naff when you take them out of their setting.

Speed concepting

In an attempt to test some speed methods during concept creation and part of the feedback from my latest peer presentation i took my original character silhouette for character 3 and gave myself 15 minutes to get as far as i could in developing the silhouette using my colouring and line art method against the painting method.

I really don't have a talent for painting, i can do it paint in shapes and put in some basic lighting but as soon as i need to put details in i just don't know how. If i go through this method it will have a better sense of depth, as that is what lighting does but i really don't enjoy it and i don't think there's much of a benefit to it,  i don't have the skill to follow up so the end result is this mussy detail-less blob. I will paint the end results as i want them to have a better sense of texture and depth but unless i can find a way to mix the two in a fast process that doesn't just look like i drew on a max of messy grey blobs i don't see me using this method.

Design Character 2 concept

This is my cleaned up and finished concept for my second design character, from the previous thumbnail designs i picked number 5 to develop and incorporate elements from the other thumbnails. I tried to mix the wasteland look and the sci-fi elements from design number 5. I got feedback in my interim presentation yesterday and i agree with what people said. This design got a little too far away from the wasteland side of the other designs and went a little too far with the sci-fi elements. Now i like the helmet, it looks good and functions as a kind of rebreather since the character has gone from damaged air which his body has become used to, into this new alien air which is much cleaner. The helmet with it's gas mask qualities makes the new air breathable to this character. If this character get's chosen i will develop him slightly to look more like he came from a damaged wasteland.

Next is character 3 which i am currently making concept thumbnails for, this character has so far been based of of a character coming from the pirate era and being thrown into this new world. My only reservation is that i have seen pirate characters in other MOBA games and i have never liked their designs. I've done some research to help with the thumbnails which i will show in another post one they are done. I will at that point assess how the character is looking and if i may want to change the direction.

Character 2 development thumbnails

Here are my development thumbnails for design character 2. As always i kept the first design pretty similar to the original and then went in other directions for the other 4 concepts. 

I quite like the unusual stature of character 1, he's that kind of strange misfit junkyard guy. All of his weapons will have either been made from scraps, salvaged or rudimentary weaponry. I would like to change up the shapes in the characters i use, introducing some slightly less average looking people would be good but i don't want them to just look completely out of place amongst the other characters.

Character 2 is a little more traditional in size, he is the kind of wastelander, scavenger warrior type character,  all of these character branch from the junkyard aesthetic of the original concept. I think this character is one of the more visually interesting out of the 5, i think he could be developed well but at the moment i think he may look a little too cliche. He is definitely a contender for my pick out of these but i may just take some elements to create a new final concept or incorporate other design elements into this one.

Character 3 is my least favourite out of the 5, it was the last one i made and as always it's my least favourite and frankly the one that looks the worst. This design really has nothing going for itself and i won't be using it. I was attempting to ad another character with a different body type  but he just looks deformed.

Character 4 is a slightly more interesting one, though a bit confused at the moment i think. He has the whole scrapyard warrior thing going on but also this mechanic kind of look with the pockets, baggy pants and wrench. I quite like the shapes that the character has but wouldn't take his forward as he is.

Character 5 is an odd one, i really like the large coat and the kind of gruff, raw, semi futuristic look he as going on but i really don't like the helmet, it looks way too Daft Punk. I do like the crude weapon though, just a chunk of scrap on a chain.  This character would need work but i do like it.

Character 1 Development

This is my character concept for character 1, i developed the police officer concept further in this iteration. I tried to make the character look as if they were an old style cop thrown into a new world and has adapted to the new technology to help her fight crime. New armour, new tools and i also incorporated an element from one of the other development concepts, i gave her a high tech prosthetic leg, this was meant to give her a little history. Injured in the line of duty when adapting to the strange new world and all of its dangers. If this character gets chosen i will then make some more tweaks and development, take into consideration some peer feedback and then flesh the character out with colour, a back view and close ups on any details. I don't colour or paint the characters at this stage because they are not final and since my painting skills are lack luster and slow it would just be a waste of my time, something i cannot afford to lose.

After this character was completed, which actually took longer than intended, i set to work on character 2. 

With this character i tried to experiment with somebody shapes since this one is quite unusual. I did realize whilst creating the development silhouettes that none of my design characters are overtly alien, considering this game is set on an alien planet and is supposed to feature characters from absolutely everywhere and when this seemed like a missed opportunity. I will be trying to incorporate more variety and less human character in the future.

These are the silhouette thumbnails i created for design character 2, i will be working these up in the same process as character 1. For this character i tried to keep working with the scrapyard warrior or battle mechanic idea. At the moment i am liking 1,2 and 5.

Project update

So recently i decided that my current working method was having a negative effect on my working speed. I was working on 3 different areas and trying to keep them all at the same level as i progressed. In theory this is a good idea and a common practice in the industry as it allows for all your work to be at the same presentable level at all times. The problem with me is that because i'm working in a new method with this silhouette style my process is not as fast as it should be, I've been struggling with the transition from silhouette to fleshed out character concept, mainly due to my lack of painting skills which from the videos I've seen is the usual progression. Instead I've been drawing over or onto the silhouette which is kind of a step back but really the only way i know how to do it. My intent now is to focus on one character and go through the entire process up until i would have to choose my final characters. In doing this i intend to set a standard on how far a characters design should be as well as seeing how quickly i can get to that level and seeing if it improves with each character.

These are the 5 character concepts i chose out of the design tier. I will do development concepts of each of these characters and then pick the best out of those concepts. Once i have my final 5 character concepts i will pick my 3 from this area and move onto finishing the lore characters.

Here are the development concepts for my first character, i always keep the first one the same  to remind myself and others where these designs came from. I explored a bunch of ideas with this character but i'm quite partial to number 4. I like the police force theme this one has going, i find that quite a lot of my characters don't always follow the theme I've set so i'd like to try and pull them back the theme of being someone from a clear background which is now influenced by the new world they are on. In the case of this character i think i will make her a police force member from some time period and then either becomes part of the police force on this new planet or sets up a police force for this new planet. The extra arms could be typical police gear to help deal with multiple perpetrators. 

Design character Thumbnails

I did these a good while ago now, i only just realized i never posted them on here. I posted them around a while ago to get peer feedback on which ones people liked the most, i guess i must of thought i posted them here too. 

Anyway after getting feedback from people it became pretty clear that there was no clear choices, nobody seemed to agree on the best thumbnails to take forward so i decided to just make the decision myself. 

I have chosen numbers 3, 4, 5, and 7 along with my previously chosen and not included character shown below.