Week 2 - Character Design & Sprites Research

Unit 8 Week 2

3rd May 2016

How to Tackle Character Design

http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/2014/08/tackle-character-design-2d-games/

Character Tutorial

http://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-an-animated-pixel-art-sprite-in-adobe-photoshop--cms-20428

Research

Character Design

"A video game character needs to be appealing and to convey the themes and messages of the game. Alright. But the design should also enable the creative team to produce all the required content to make the character work ingame and in promotional art."

This means that my character needs to be simple, so that the animation process wont be too difficult, but also appealing to the target audience. This means no crazy designs and do not overcomplicate the design.

"1930’s Mickey Mouse

• A – Mickey’s design is almost completely made out of circular shapes. Circles and ovals are easy to draw by hand. You are also very unlikely to be struggling with perspective since there are no straight lines or angles to get right when it comes to perspective foreshortening or working with vanishing points.

• B – Eyes are reduced to dots. This means there is no need to draw any other part of the eye except the pupils. If you want to articulate the eyes closing, you just squeeze the pupils flat to resemble shut eyes.

• C – Arms and legs are bendy wobbly tubes. So no bones, no muscles, no joins. All limps look the same from all sides, they are never too long or too short. You just have to draw a thick black line from the shoulder to the hand and done.

• D – His hands only have four fingers. Four fingers are quicker to draw than five fingers. Three fingers would not be enough to be articulate enough.

• E – The white gloves have been invented to make hand gestures more easily readable. Turns out that you can best discern individual fingers, when they are draw with thick black outlines on a white surface.

• F – The design uses a lot of completely blacked out areas. This means no details whatsoever in those areas to take care of. The front of his body looks exactly like his back or the sides, so no perspective to worry about either.

• G – Clothing is heavily abstracted and there is no folding whatsoever. Easy to draw with just enough detail so that we accept the things on his feet to be shoes and the thing on his hips to be pants"

The idea of looking at the features that make a character would help me see how it will appeal to an audience as well as how the character would work in the world. No matter if its simple and stylised or realistic, thought needs to be put into what the character wears, the colours and the style as it will all influence the design process and ideas. The character Mickey Mouse was designed to be simple and recognisable, this will allow anyone to draw him, but also let people instantly recognise him even from a quick glance.

As I want my game to focus on simplistic combat, I believe that having simple character designs would help to appropriate this style. It would also help with the time constraints as I don't have too long to work on this, so simple designs will help me to keep up with my schedule.

Sprites

When working on using sprites, one of the most common art styles are pixel art. This style usually comes in two categories, 16bit and 8bit.

"The 16bit+ box is filled with pixel art (beginning in the 16bit console era and higher), where each pixel is carefully placed to create a low resolution image resembling a hand drawn piece of art."

This would require a lot of effort and skill that would take too much time to create for this small project. Even if I had the time and skill to do this, I do not think that this would fit with the simple style of game that I wish to create.

Lucas Arts adventure classics: Maniac Mansion series and The Dig

This style takes time as you can't just draw, but have to build the image using blocks of colour. This can also be messed up if the game is played on a screen size that differs from the one that it was made for as it uses a bitmap image.

"8bit is a collection of pixels, creating a distinctively blocky design."

Legend of Zelda series / Legend of the Ghost Lion

This simple style and low resolution would mean that less detail would be required and would fit with the style of my game. It also means that people would expect to see less frames during animation to give the characters the blocky movement that it looks like they should have.

It is for the above reasons that I have chosen to have my game work with a simple 8bit aesthetic, as I feel it would not only make the project more likely to be finished within the time that I have, but also fit the whole simple theme I am going with.