Week 9 - The Hero...

Unit 8

When designing my main character I used the information that i collected in my survey in order to create a character that people would enjoy. I also wanted to create a character that would not look out of place in the game, this meant designing a character that feels similar to all the other things for the game that I have made thus far.

Version 1

This was the original design that I was going to use before I collected my primary research. As you can see it differs greatly from the designs of the other characters, mainly due to the fact that it has shading on the character. The character goes against what my research suggested, which was a simple character that fits in with the world around them. This character also proved hard to animate walking, and while I did get it to a level that I was happy with, I then had to animate the sides, which I was unable to get to a level that I was happy with, so I decided to make a new character.

Version 2

After the failed attempt the was version 1 I decided to follow the information that I collected from the survey and attempt to make a simple character that did not have a set identity. This was the design I came up with. This design was far easier to work with due to how little detail. It also fits into the design of the other characters, which was a major complaint that I had with the previous character.

While the simplicity of the character made it easier to animate, I still felt that the shape of the character did not work well with animating. The movement cycle just felt too... solid. I could not make the body feel like it was moving when working with this shape, and like the previous design, animating the sides was very difficult. In the end I decided to try and create one more character that used a different body shape that would be easier to animate. I also did not like the appearance of this character, and would like a more cuts character...

Version 3

This is the design that I have decided to use for my game. The design is simple enough that the character is still open to interpretation, such as gender, age and personality, but not so simple that it looks strange. It is also simple enough that animating it is not too much work, and it even helps the animating process due to its simple design, as I don't need to create a very realistic walking cycle. This was something that I found out while doing secondary research on pixel based games and it told me that an 8bit character only needs to represent a person and can use very simple animation.

I decided on using a large head as I wanted to give off an innocent feeling from the character, as I attempted to achieve with all my other ones. I also made sure things like the black outline and solid colour was kept from all my other work as it would be needed to keep consistency with everything.

The animation was aimed to reflect the innocent appearance of the character, as well as not being overly complex. To do this I gave it a very simple boring animation, that appears like the character is skipping. I also added swaying hair, to help make it look like the character is moving.

I also am happy with the outcome of the side walk cycle, although the hand on each step does bother me a little, as it gets very small on each step...

The actual design of the character was actually just an attempt to make a character that could be taken for either gender, and while the blue might suggest that the character be a boy, I believe that down to the features of the character I have succeeded.

This has shown me that designing a character and creating a character are both very difficult tasks, as just because you have an idea does not mean that you can make it happen. This was shown with both my original ideas, which could not be animated as they proved too difficult or did not look right compared to the rest of the game assets. I believe creating a template for characters would fix this problem to some degree, as then you only need to edit the template to look like the character, rather than making the entire character and animate them.

Now that I have the characters finished, I can get to work on backgrounds, before finally starting production...