DE4401: Games Design (MA) Literature Review: Effective Character Design

 Most of my time currently has been working on both my Literary Essay, as well as exploring Character Design as what I would like to focus on for the rest of the foreseeable course.

I have looked to examples in games such as Shin Megami Tensei, Pokemon, Dragon Quest and movies such as Beauty And The Beast and Alice In Wonderland.

Here is the draft for my literature essay.

During the process of making a video game, be it an independently developed game of a project with a larger budget, one of the most significantly important aspects of the development cycle is Character Design. This is where an artist has to consider many aspects about what a character should look like, be they a humanoid species, an animal, a mineral or even a vegetable.
Without characters, it may be very difficult to tell a story with the lack of a perspective or a point of focus from someone that can speak or gesture in their environment. Whatever the artist can think of, they will almost always have the skills necessary to bring such a thought into being. Because the  art world covers many diverse topics and ideas, designing characters for various different worlds, stories, and most importantly, how a character looks to help convey these ideas. Each and every artist will also draw in distinctly different artstyles, as well, due in part  In this essay I will be taking an extensive look into what can make a character’s design especially effective and appealing to an observer as well as a group of observers, whilst also taking a look into some of the philosophies that can make a character’s design especially effective and nuance from various different artists that have inspired me greatly with my own processes of Character Design.

LITERARY EXAMPLES:
The character designer for Shin Megami Tensei V, Masayuki Doi, who has worked with Atlus to design the newest main characters and Demons for the game, has had an interview conducted on him, explaining his design process about the main character when they become the Nahobino.
“The white curves on the body represent the environment, often used as a motif in ancient Pre-Christianity religion around the world. (…) The hair, which is the most eye-catching feature, is a manifestation of Nahobino’s life force. This is because hair is considered sacred since ancient times, said to be the source of vitality with transcendent abilities.” Masayuki has taken careful consideration when creating this character, including the appropriate mythological significance that is important to this game series.

Conveying emotion in a character’s design is very important aspect in how a character looks, in order to effectively bring out a reaction in an observer, which is something that the artist or designer wants to intentionally happen. A study taken by the University Of Trente in the Netherlands had a group observe aa set of characters, in varying different artstyles to see if they could identify the appropriate emotion that was trying to be conveyed.

The level of accuracy in identifying each emotion was
measured by analyzing what emotions were correctly identified
by the students (extracted from responses to the multiple-
choice question 3). Sadness, anger, and happiness were the
emotions best identified by students. The p-values in Table 2
measure whether there are differences in identifying each
emotion in the chosen character. Sadness, fear, and surprise are
the three emotions whose identification significantly depends
on the character. Results also showed that it is more difficult
to identify sadness in Yuriy and fear and surprise in Paul.
Concerning anger, happiness, and disgust, these emotions are
equally identified in the six characters.
Question 3 also allows insights into the global
misclassification rate for each emotion (Table 3). Surprise
is partly misclassified with disgust (18.8%) and fear (17.4%) as
well as disgust with fear (23.2%) and fear with surprise (37.7%).
Responses to question 4 capture the intensity of each
emotion perceived by the students, over a three-level scale
(low, medium, high). Surprise (56.4%), sadness (48.7%), and
fear (44.3%) are the most intense perceived emotions.


CONTEXTUAL EXAMPLES:

DISNEY MOVIES:
While not a video game, the character design philosophies seen in various Disney movies are a great example of how effective character design can come through. A good example of this is Beauty And The Beast, where each of the Beast’s servants are turned into mundane objects, such as candlesticks, teapots, dressers and clocks. Each of their designs reflect the personalities of the characters, with careful consideration for what each object they are.
Another movie that follows this character design philosophy effectively is Alice In Wonderland, where each of the card soldiers act as a single unit, carrying out the will and orders of the Red Queen, which helps to establish a hierarchy in their designs.

MARIO
Poses:
While the designs of a character are greatly important, the posing and position of a character can help to convey many different aspects of a character, be it their personality, abilities, or general appeal to a consumer. This is seen well with Super Mario Odyssey and the posing of Mario as seen on the box art.
From the Super Mario odyssey Artbook, The Art Director, Rikuto Yoshida, says,
“I remember seeing people throwing real hats around the animators’ seats around this time. In the process of fine-tuning the animation, focusing on the sharpness of the rotation and the pose after the throw, the image of the hat-throwing was gradually solidified.”, and the Character Art Lead, Sho Murata, also states,
“In order to make it immediately recognizable as a new mario game, I came up with poses that would simultaneously introduce the new action of hat-throwing and the new character, Cappy. In fact, the relationship between Mario’s hands and feet is not that different from his jumping pose, and I designed it so that I feels familiar yet fresh.” This shows the process and practice used for creating an unique aspect for an existing design, giving it a purpose in the context of the game.

The designs of enemies in the Super Mario Bros games are iconic due to their simplicity and consideration for the hardware. In the first three games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, each sprite is only 3 colours due to limitations of the hardware, but what is used of them is simple and effective, and their movement and appearance can easily tell you what the enemies are like in gameplay. For example, some enemies have round shells so they can be jumped on, while some enemies have spikier shells that can’t be landed on, some enemies can fly in the air via a cloud, and some even throw balls of fire and hammers, the colours of which are a good way to tell what projectile they fire.

SMT by ATLUS: Shigenori Soejima, Masayuki Doi, Kazuma Kaneko
The demons in the Shin Megami Tensei games and its spinoff titles all take mythology that was established, and use that to create a more modern interpretation of that figure. The intent being that each design has a more adult, or modern edge to match with the tone of the games’ settings and subtext of the apocalypse. All of which belong in the same family of design, and their visual appearances in each design reflect the stories and description taken from their own unique mythologies. While they may look slightly different to actual mythological depictions, some of the demons compensate this with being given a more mechanical, or alien appearance, all in order to fit in with the tones and aesthetics of the games, the idea that angels and demons can be man-made and more monstrous than what historical accounts may state.

One of the artists for the game, Kazuma Kaneko and Masayuki Dio’s processes were described by ‘Eirikr’ in Hardcore Gaming 101’s The Unofficial Guide To Shin Megami Tensei and Persona.

“Atlus’ two demon designers, the esteemed Kazuma Kaneko and the up-and-coming Masayuki Doi, generally follow the principle of “form follows function,” an idea that also perfectly applies to the symbology of religious art, where the form imitates a deity’s function in nature or its place in a mythic hierarchy; for example, traditional depictions of sun gods include solar imagery like rays or sun discs. Naturally, Kaneko’s version of the Inca sun god Inti is literally a stylized sun head atop a body; meanwhile, Doi’s crimson-clad Mephisto imitates the costuming of plays based on the Faust legend, producing a meaningful archetypal image of the beguiling devil.”

This study shows the principes that these artists take to design each of these characters for these games, and the exaggeration and appropriate referencing of these gods and demons that applies.

DRAGON QUEST
The main characters of Dragon Quest each have unique designs which help to define their personalities, and in some cases, do help define their roles in each of the games that show up in.
Since the games have a connecting story with a canon lineage, some of the characters from each game have connections within their design, such as being descended from one another. The monster design in each of the games are a distinct highlight in design because of how vastly different each of the monsters are, filling in very different categories of monster to make each game’s bestiary varied. Some of these monsters are so iconic, that asking a person in Japan to draw a Slime will usually result in the blue gumdrop shaped monster from these games.
In an interview with Akira Toriyama, he has given insight on his design philosophies,
“Also, because the series is a fantasy, there is a certain established time period and setting that you can’t remove from your design work.(…)I created tons of designs that were rejected, back in the old days, but I got to paint countless small-fry monsters, which is what I love to do, and sometimes I get nostalgic for that.”


POKEMON:
Currently, there are close to one thousand different Pokemon that have been designed and refined for at least decades. The main Pokemon character designer, Ken Sugimori, has had to consider many real life animals, objects, concepts, and mythological creatures and figures to draw inspiration from for each Pokemon game’s roster. Each region in each game has a mix of older and all new Pokemon for the trainer character to find, and each of the Pokemon’s evolutions have to be considered in each design, which can help to enhance the idea considered for each of the Pokemon.
Furthermore, the non-Pokemon characters, the trainers, are all designed by the same artist, and each of them are made to be just as unique. Looking at each one lets the player know what types of Pokemon they may use against you. This philosophy is further boosted by the Gym Leader characters, who use only a specific type of Pokemon in order to challenge the player.

An interview taken by Ken Sugimori shows the kinds of ideas and processes that he had to consider when working on the first games.
Sugimori explains his design process originally when starting out with designing the Pokemon.
“It started with designs of dinosaurs and monsters. Then we started out designing cute Pokemon. As the games development progressed, we added the ideas of ‘types’ to the game system, and so we added in changes like the flame on Charmander’s tail, or having a plant growing out of Venusaur’s back.

CONCLUSION:
Overall, the methods and practices used to create effective character design are substantially varied, where one can use many techniques in one design to convey various pieces of information with one

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Eirikr. (2021). Demons by Design: An Introduction to Patterns of Form and Function in Shin Megami Tensei. [Online]. Blogger. Last Updated: January 17th 2021. Available at: https://eirikrjs.blogspot.com/2021/01/demons-by-design.html [Accessed 15 November 2022].

M. del Valle-Canencia. (2022). The Emotion's Effect On a Virtual Characters Design - A Student Perspective. University Of Twente, Netherlands: Human-Media Interaction. pp.8-9

Sato. (2017). Akira Toriyama Talks About Dragon Quest. [Online]. SiliconEra. Last Updated: January 4th, 2017. Available at: https://www.siliconera.com/akira-toriyama-talks-work-character-designer-dragon-quest/ [Accessed 14 November 2022].