Narrowing Down Art Choices

After having our class yesterday and doing a review, we've come down to a few design choices for the characters.

Our foremost concern for all of the characters that will be in space is their silhouette. As I mentioned in last week's post, their shape is going to be very important in that it'll allow the players to recognize the characters from afar more easily. This idea is a bit more important concerning the difference between the player character and the enemy characters. 

For this reason we've chosen to go with radical shape differences between the two. As you can see with the Anti-Bot, we want to go for a shape that's much different than the almost humanoid preferences circled in the player-bot section. I want the player-bot to have a lot more softness to it and I kind of like the contrast the anti-bot has at the moment with it's harsh, almost industrial appearance.

 

Helper-bots silhouette was sort of known from the start. Everyone seems to like it's longer shape which helps in it's function; its meant to keep the players from straying out of the 'playing field' and follows the player around to stop it from doing so. Kind of like a space goalie with the player being the ball. The ones with the red checks next to them seemed to be the more popular during the review in class. I'm particularly fond of the bottom left one and the middle one. 

I've been taking animation into consideration for these, too. Especially for the main character. That was one of the critiques we received for the main character. Now that I'm on as the team's animator, it's going to be an interesting task to make these robots move. The somewhat humanoid one in the top middle of the picture below seems to have the best potential for interesting animations. 

See you next week!

Update 2

Hello everyone!

Pretty straightforward this week, just some concept art to upload.

Most of this is just start up to get ready for Greenlight. Our team is planning on doing our greenlight presentation in 2-3 weeks. I'm going to be working on some more character concepts to show the team on Sunday so we can start honing on styles and shapes for the characters. I tried to branch out in the robot's designs. Though there's only one example of it, the reason I didn't want to go into the style of the Mars rover-type robot is that it seems too realistic for this game. But when I showed the concepts to our lead artist, she seemed to like something about it, so that might be something the team brings up as interesting. Otherwise, I tried to push the designs in simple styles, complicated styles, round vs. hard edges, and a few humanoid robots.

We had a discussion about wanting to try out a new mechanic in order to make the zoom in feature more useful. The idea that there might be life on the planets if you zoom in was given, so I started doing some ideas of things that could live on the planets. Robotic animals, anyone? Logically, it might not make too much sense but this game is pretty whimsical so the team might like the idea. 

Till next week!

Start of Second Semester

Hello everyone!

So just to recap, Phantom Mansion did not pass into second semester. The members of our team and the others that got cut were relocated and drafted to other teams. This semester I joined Team SuperGeneric as the character artist for their game, SunBots. In the game, the player control a small robot tasked with collecting energy from planets to shoot into the sun that is dying.

The second semester focuses almost entirely on production. We have the first 3 or so weeks to do some iteration, however, and find new ways to improve our game. As a team we want to explore some different options.

Our first big milestone is Greenlight. The goal for greenlight is to have the final designs of the three in-game characters. These characters in specific are the main sun-collecting robot, the enemy robots, and the neutral helper bot. By next week's update I hope to have concept art for all three characters. For now, I'll post some references I've been collecting for the characters.

The style of the game is storybook-like. The characters created by the team's original artist were intended to be friendly and approachable.






Here are some of the references of other robot character that I think will be useful in achieving a look and feel similar to the one existing.

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Chibi-Robo and Telly Vision of the game Chibi Robo


main character from Whatever Happened to Robot Jones


Canti from Fooly-Cooly


The robots from Mystery Science Theater 3000


The Iron Giant

Mainly what I want is to create easily recognizable characters. They'll need to have strong silhouettes to stand out against the space backgrounds. I would like to have them be as personable as the first examples but that might not be as much of a issue as the characters are usually seen from far away.

See you next week with the concept art.