Week 7 - Player Character Research

Unit 8

Undertale - Frisk

Who

This is the main character of the game Undertale, who goes by the name Frisk. They are a human that has fallen into a world of monsters and the player must guide them out. Depending on the choices the player makes, Frisk can be a gentle pacifist who wishes to make friends, or a child of evil who wants nothing more than genocide. This is one of the only characters in the game to not have a more detailed sprite, as you do not get to see them in a situation where the design would be necessary. This means the only design for this character are the overworld sprite and the cover art.

Points of Interests

• Simple
• Pixelated
• Not Gendered
• Not Realistic
• Very Limited Colour Pallet

Analysis

The design for Frisk is very basic and simple. This would help with the animation as you only have a very basic design to animate. Also the character has no set gender, this shows heavily in the design as the character has almost no qualities that would indicate any one gender. Frisk also has no traits that would indicate any personality, this makes them a blank slate that is able to be molded into whatever the player wishes. This design choice fits with the fact that this is an RPG (Role Playing Game) heavily relying on choice.

The pixelated style simply comes from the art style of the game as a whole, this style of design gives the game its retro feel and also keeps design choices very basic as you don't need to add much detail to these sprites. Realism in design is not a problem with this design, as people don't expect realism in a retro styled pixelated game. This means that the connotations with the style heavily impacted the design choices, as the creator did not want to break the belief that the game could be from this retro style.

By using a very basic and limited colour pallet, the character can be easily identified by the colours that they wear. Each character has their own colour pallet and very few are shared, this helps identify and differentiate each character, making them seem like their own individual.

Legend of Zelda - Link

Who

Link is the main protagonist in most of the Legend of Zelda titles. While there are many variations of the character, I chose to focus on the original as it was made in retro style similar to Undertale. Link is a boy who was tasked with saving a princess from a demon king. Just like the character, the player is not given much information and is expected to make their own choices on how to proceed. This allows the player so put themselves into the characters shoes and feel more immersed and fit the genre of RPG.

Points of Interest

• Very simple colour pallet
• No outlines
• Very little detail
• Not many pixels

Analysis

Very similar to the design of Frisk in Undertale, Link has a very simple colour pallet that makes him recognizable. Unlike Undertale, Legend of Zelda was limited by the technology, this meant that design choices like this would have been heavily constrained by this. Something else that was likely done due to technology limitations was the lack of outlines.