The nature of the night world, to me, is the twisted emotions and feelings of people given form. This is why where the creepy angle comes in. I wanted the enemies to be shadowy figures to represent something unnatural and wrong to the player.

Ideas

When the team looked at these ideas, they liked the top right enemy as it had no legs, and the bottom left character as it had a simple design and looked more shadow-person-like than the rest of them. With that and the decision that the team was going to do the tutorial part of the game, I decided that the best thing to do in this situation was to design a very simple bad guy that would appear in tutorial segments of games.

 

Mini Enemy

Therefore I designed this enemy. It is completely simple. With this design, the animators do not have to worry about animating legs as ther isn’t any, plus with its simple structure, it should be easy to animate in general.

Holly mentioned to the team about a lock system attached to the enemies, so while I was designing the enemy, I also drew some locks that could for the game. Another thing was that there were three types of emotions involved (fear, isolation and vitriol/malice) so I tried thinking of a way that the player could tell the difference between the emotions. And then that’s when it struck me that I can just change the face and colour of the enemy and it is as simple as that. The lock I then chose was the heart lock, as I thought it fitted well with the emotion theme.

Mini Enemy Designs:

With that, I then created three static poses to show to the team, an idle pose, and charging pose (would be when the enemy moves towards the player), and a hit reaction poses when the player hits the enemy.

Fear

Malice

Isolation