*dusts off blog*
The task – coming up with designs for a game with no UI and the theme ‘Wily’
Co-incidentally, the whole project was named ‘No Coyotes, which, y’know, knocked out everyone’s first idea. Which is a shame because I rather fancied drawing some baby coyotes.
In the end though we went for a game where two younger siblings have to sabotage the elder sibling’s attempt to babysit them. We worked out that we were going to go for a Fallout Shelter kind of style, with 2D characters on a 3D background.
(screencap from my game – no, I don’t know why there’s a pregnant woman running around with a knife and ham in hand)
We initially thought that we’d go with an older sibling (around 13-15) a middle sibling (9-7) and a younger one (5-3). I started to come up with some very loose concepts for some of the characters – at this point we hadn’t decided what combination of male and female characters to go with.
(some early ideas – preliminary thumbnails, and some quick drawings from them)
By this point, the games students had put up an initial list of animations needed, so I thought it would probably be a lot easier to just draw the character concepts straight onto the character manikins so I could get on with animating as soon as the characters were approved.
(‘finished’ concepts – these were uploaded to the Google Drive the four of us shared + our facebook group to get approval)
After these were uploaded, the other students in the group let me know that we were going to be going with a three brothers concept – so I picked one boy design from each age and stuck them together as the first test (around this time I started working on the manikin animations, figuring that it would be easy to add the character over the top once it was fully decided.
(first character pass – I picked totally arbitrary colours from a palette we’d approved that would match the background colours)
After this one went up, the games students contacted me and told me that they had decided to go with an elder brother and twin siblings idea (I think possibly because it was easier for them to only have to deal with two heights vs three? In any case, I was totally on board because it meant I’d only have to come up with two sets of animation, so it worked out great for us all)
They’d given me a brief as to what the two twin concepts should look like – there was basically supposed to be a ‘good’ twin and a ‘bad twin’ so I mashed together a few of the above concepts to come up with a group of characters we were all happy with.
(second character pass – and the ultimately approved one. I made the elder brother a little more straight laced looking, gave the ‘bad’ twin a mischievous facial expression (it’s amazing what tilted eyebrows do for a character!) and the skull shirt and used the flattened hairstyle to give the good twin a ‘good guy’ look)
These were the final designs for the in game characters, and ultimately I’m pretty happy with them – I got to make most of the creative decisions re: what they actually looked like. I would have liked to have picked one of the mixed gender groups of siblings – or at least have been able to go for an elder brother, with a boy/girl set of twins, but it was ultimately decided that we’d go with the three brothers concept.
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