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.

Lore characters

So i've been moving along with my lore characters and decided to put all my lore pages into the format i previously showed, i got kind of tired of opening the word doc all the time to read through my lore profiles. I also thought it would be nicer to post them up here in a format easier to post so that they could be read along with my thumbnails.

My Targe lore was posted up last time but i'm putting it up again to go with the thumbnails, i had most of these done for a while but couldn't get a decent last one out so i've been putting off posting if, i cracked on with it though and did some other silhouettes for lore characters once i got back into it.

These are my 5 silhouette thumbnails for my character Targe, he's a kind of scrap yard warrior so i tried to incorporate that into the silhouette shapes. Once i have all my other lore character silhouettes done and posted i will be choosing my favorite 3 silhouettes from each character to fully work up and take forward. I'm not going to do all 5 because i'm behind in my work and if they don't look good in silhouettes they're likely not going to look good when finished so there is no point me wasting my time on them. At the moment i'm liking 1,3 and 5 from Targe's silhouettes. He also kind of reminds me of one of my design characters, the short one, i may end up combining them in Targe's lore doesn't get taken forward as my chosen character.

This is a moodboard i made of various things that inspired some of the shapes i used in the silhouettes, i actively tried to get these kids of items and feelings into the characters, some more sucessful than others.

Here is Norah's lore page, it's the largest one i did and had a hard time fitting it on the format, i may need to condense it if i take it forward. I do quite like Norah but i'm worried it may be a little to close to X-men.

These are my silhouettes based on Norah's lore page, she was a little more difficult to work with since there is more story in her lore and less descriptive text on how she looks so i had to go with some sci-fi like assassin looks, i also threw some super powers in to show what else she could do. Being able to steal other peoples powers after death is a hard aspect to draw in a silhouette.

Here is the moodboard that inspired my Norah silhouettes.

Lore page graphic

So now that i created a method of displaying my text based design elements, i figured i'd try it with my lore pages too, with some little changes. I changed some things just to see some variation, i also added a binary texture to the back  ground which i think helps make it look more interesting  I also found some settings to help me do some glow effects, it didn't work so great on the text but the alternative is just way too time consuming. My ability ones has some variation in them so as i was putting them together so they're not final, presentation is one of my weak points and it tends to be an after thought so i figured i'd at least get some ideas down along the way. I like how this one turned out, i'll probably do some research into how things like this look in movies.

Aliens research

When coming up with a character type for ability sets i really wanted to do some kind of alien, i initially went with a lizard type of alien based on my animals research  I decided against this and did some research on types of aliens in other media first. I looked at movies like Alien and Predator, probably the two most well known aliens outside of the typical little grey man, one is a biological killing machine and the other is a technologically equipped hunter. I looked at the Asari from Mass effect, thinking that some kind of physic ability would be good for a mage archetype. A comic i read at the moment is Invincible, the character in image number 4, he is an alien with pretty typical super powers, as much as i would like to create a super hero i don't think it would fit into this games theme that well. The type that stood out to me the most was the symbiote, the ones from the SpiderMan comic and from the Dragon Ball Z cartoon. Both take on hosts or absorb people to gain strength.

1st Draft Ability Sets

These are the 1st drafts for my character ability sets, the third method of design i'm using to create characters. I did these over the Christmas period but I've held up on posting them here because they were done in a format in word that does not translate well to blogger. To avoid this i mocked up this kind of sci fi ish display for profiles. 

When creating these i found it hard to create the abilities out of nothing so i tried to create a rough theme or archetype for each set in order to create them, this worked much better. I also did some extra research to help me come up with some ideas that weren't in my previous research, mainly types of aliens from various media.

To help me decide which of these to refine and take forward i will be getting some peer feedback.