DE4403: Games Design (MA): Character Designs + Explanations

As an artist who specializes in Character Design, it is important that my process is documented to explain the path the design took, and any changes made in between, along with the finished product as proof of the concept that I am trying to achieve.

How my process starts is to think about what character I need for the specific purpose in a project. This could be a main character, a side character, an NPC who has the purpose of interacting with the player, or an enemy that needs to be placed in a certain area, more importantly, bosses and villains fir in that catergory.

Designing part of a world before designing a character helps to give me an advantage when designing how a character and their outfit should look, because it is able to tell a lot about their culture and personality.

The features I usually focus on when first designing a character is the face and hairstyle, most importantly the eyes, as a lot of the expression of a character comes from the eyes and the position of the eyebrows to illicit a certain emotion.
CHARACTER DESIGN:

The character I have put the most time into developing, Tarant Mortarson, has gone through many different designs over the years, as my own skills have improved significantly, so has the methods I have undertook whilst designing him. His main colour palettes started off as red and blue, which was to evoke more heroic colours often seen in fiction, but this was slowly decided upon as an unsuitable choice for the outfit. 

This evolved into Tarant wearing more conventional armour, such as chain mail and shin pads, despite him also being able to cast spells like a wizard, which was when the idea evolved further to giving his outfit more identity with a defined colour palette of blues, and the new refinement of the outfit, including the pointed shoes and cape, shoulder plates and tabard that evoked more of a heroic identity and made a lot more sense with how much protection it would give him in a fight. This is all in context of his story, where the armour he wears is given to him by a goddess that he is soon in service to.

This design choice is all because I wanted his appearance to stand out more in his overall presence, so that it would be easier to identify the character and his emotions through his appearance. Part of this was helped by the change in his hairstyle, which was changed to reflect his character more, swept to one side behind his ears so they wouldnt get in the way whilst he focused.

As the Major Arcana of tarot cards was a major theme in the story he was the lead of, I had to reflect that idea by giving Tarant the cards themselves as magical weapons, and his crest on his tabard was card-shaped, to help evoke the purpose of his outfit and quest throughout his world, reflected by the compass points that encompasses the card shape.

The butterfly wings are a nod to the magical nature of the Tarot Cards in the story, and giving Tarant more fey-like qualities and details was very important, while also serving functional purpose for the fights he must battle in. This also plays into the themes of the Butterfly Effect and Chaos Theory, which are powers that Tarant is granted with these cards, so I took this to a literal example with the wings.

The outfit on the left was an imagining of the character in a modern day world, with contemporary clothing, whilst also reflecting his own magical properties through his outfit, though as a normal human in this context, he exhibits none of them practically.

Around this time, I had taught myself how to draw more realistic proportions without going completely realistic and normal in order to keep a stylistic presence, I had taught myself how to shade the body and hair differently to help highlight each of their details, whilst helping to create more depth in each design, and I learnt how to draw eyes in a more stylized way that allowed for much more expression, the way I drew hair and hands was done with more realism as opposed to drawing them too round (which would have clashed badly with my new methods), and the further practice with using a drawing tablet caused the sketches and line art to take on much more detail and originality.

The next character who was from the same project as Tarant is his younger sister, Emma Mortarson.
When creating a character who is a sibling to an existing one, it was important for me to have similarities to Tarant, whilst also having distinct differences so that she will be seen as her own character.

Her outfit is designed in the same way as Tarant's was, however the colours are different, which is to symbolize her different upbringing from another household at a young age, as well as her duty in the story being that of the same as Tarant's. She has less protection on her armour as Tarant does, which is because she is a healer-like character who is not meant for the front lines of battle, which is what her weapon is meant to symbolize, taking into account the same motifs of design with Tarant.

The shape of Emma's eyes is designed to be similar to Tarant's, but rounded around the top, in order to reflect the roundness of their late mother's eyes, to differenciate from Tarant's, and to bring out her more passive personality.

One of the characters I have designed is Parsley Crispum, mainly used in personal projects, as well as appearing as a playable character in my Honours Project, Knights Of Tarot.

With her design, Parsley was a character I wanted to fill the role of a dancer/performer class in a party, similar to classes in games such as Bard and Dancer. Primarily, her skills revolve around ribbon dancing, whcih is what her background is. Her colour palette was also to reflect her namesake, whilst also being very natural, full of many greens, the palette can be considered very pure and healthy, whilst also having a touch of envy, which she does display to others time to time. Her hairstyle was also originally modelled after parsley sprigs, bit it also makes her hair comprise of many smaller ribbons, whilst having function as a tidier hairstyle so she won't get any ribbons tangled up.
The curled boots and leafy skirt also bring out a more fey look, as peers had described her looking like a 'fairy princess', which ended up sticking as the idea of her being a fairy worked very well.

From another project that I worked on, Lucin Vallery is the main character from the concept of a puzzle game/visual novel hybrid, Sigil.

Lucin's outfit and equipment are meant to reflect historically accurate uniforms seen in victorian schools, and are meant to reflect the timeframe that Sigil's story takes place in. that being the late 1800's. Despite the more supernatural aspects of the story that take place, everything else is still grounded in reality and operates on real-world logic.

Unlike the other characters I have designed for, the colour palette is more grounded and downplayed, owing to the tone and genre of the game Sigil.

MONSTER DESIGN:
While designing humanoid characters is important, it's greatly important to be able to design non-human characters, such as animals and monsters. Populating a world with many kinds of creatures is a great way to flesh out a world and its inhabitants. An important part about these kinds of creatures is that making them a part of the world organically can take many designs to do so, and different habitats have to be considered.

These monsters shown here are meant to be found in low-level areas, in the grassy fields, forests and small caves. They normally dont pose a much of a threat, and are meant to be appealing to a newcomer so that they will recognise different types of enemy.
Some of these enemies will have variations that appear later on, whcih will be stronger, such as Saladmander having the relatives Cayennewt and Cressted Gecko, sticking with its theme on vegetables.
My main points of inspiration with creating monsters such as this was the Dragon Quest series with how monsters are created from what would be found in a certain environment, or going for a combination of two animals with a creative 'pun' name, or a unique spin on a certain animal type.
The enemies shown here are made to show up in Knights Of Tarot, the GBStudio project from my Honours project.

A set of enemies I wanted to put in the game was my own version of the 'Metal Slime' trope, born from Dragon Quest, meaning a set of enemies that, while rare to encounter, give great rewards once defeated. In this case, the game Knights Of Tarot needed a set of this type of enemy, and I set out to make a rare card-like enemy with a grotesque appearance to offset the appeal of seeing one. The rewards are still bountiful, as promised of an enemy such as this.
Their appearance is also meant to be chaotic and inherently evil, which does contrast the theme of order of the main enemies of the game, their chaotic nature caused them to be exiled so that they wouldnt be seen again. Some are still found by the player in rare instances.
The versions that give more Experience points are meant to have more cards as part of their evolution of design, similar to what Dragon Quest does with metal Slimes, simply having them as bigger slimes that give more Experience points.

Currently rough sketches, I had ideas to create more humanoid enemies that serve the side of the villains in the story of Knights Of Tarot. These are two types of soldiers called Dire Squires and Hell Sentinels, specialising in medium and heavy combat against the player. I have plans to add more of them in order to flesh out the bestiary and rogue's gallery of the world more.