the first slide explained the style we wanted to achieve which was ‘Saturday morning cartoon’, where characters had smaller torsos, short stature but bulky legs and armour along with an oversized head covered by a helmet. including games that I found with similar styles including From space, Mouse, Jetpack Joyride, Guns of rage and Doom Slayer.
I made a second slide, including samples of elements to the character I wanted to incorporate in the NPC along with a sketch I made and that Sean had made. This slide just showed samples of character design I wanted to achieve in my overall character.
I included another slide with samples of an alien which nobody had made sketches for so the feedback was to decide if the aliens were going to have opposing designs to reflect the difference in good and bad, the good guys looking one way and the bad looking the complete opposite which I thought was a great idea.
Next, was the controversial colouring slide that we made. We had previously agreed on which was a retro style of colouring. Luca, Sean and I discussed this since and agreed that our style was too cartoony not to have colour which is basically what the game design students wanted. We really wanted to show that colour was important to go with our style and that we’d be graded on our this and they wouldn’t be but they didn’t really wanna budge. After class, when sean and Luca left, they called the lecturers over and said we were having a disagreement. The client said at the end of the day it’s down to us, the animators but they still didn’t want this style, not understating that shooting games don’t have to be dark and grim and bloody??? It feels like we have absolutely no say in this and even after the discussion they were difficult to budge, they haven’t really changed much about their mindset but for now we’re gonna still have more colour, it will just not be as bright as the blues and pinks I have in the far right of the slide above.
My last slide included the prop design which I am not a part of. This, again, was a problem with the game designers, they want realism and because one of them is making the guns which is a huge part of the prop design its really difficult to get across that they have to fit a different style. We’ve told her multiple times that her designs are too sharp and realistic compared to our style and her response was that she needs to see the arms before she can do that but she had so it’s really bothering even though I had put images on our shared micro board of similar designs.
All in all, this module has proven to be very stressful thus far, the game students have it in their mind that the game has to be gloomy and resemble dark fast paced shooter games but that’s not coinciding with the style we agreed on and they refuse to change anything or compromise which is really stressful for us animators.
For the art style guides I contributed the alien and npc guides, I made the presentation and initial research references and I made the colour pallets.
I began work of my sketches for the art guide this week aswell as blocking out the NPC character and arms I will be designing.
Below is a link to a Pinterest board I created filled with reference images for environment, props and characters.
I researched lots of different samples to use for my characters as I would designing the NPC and an alien, I looked a lot at MegaMan and the armour used, exaggerating the size of the arms and legs which is something I wanted to incorporate in my designs. I also looked at the enemies in Mega man which take on a more robust design but part of the same series, I liked the armour on their chest and their helmets.
One of the initial insperations I found was of a game character from Doom slayer, the big head, long arms but stumpy legs was something I really wanted to have in my design but after talking to the game students, having chunky arms would be hard to have holding guns in first person so I designed a few of my own options.
I like Rick’s design in this specific episode of Rick and Mory, where his arms are more simple and cylindrical, the armour is less bulky but overall it still gives a chunky look to the suit.
different options for the arms of the npc, I asked the game design students if any of them would interfere with holding the weapons and they said the designs should work.
After finishing my style guide I got some feedback that the red in the armour was too much as the game will change colours based on temperature so I went to our colour pallets and chose a different option.
The game design students really wanted the blackouts as an idea so I got to making simple blackouts as well, adding darker colours but still having more than greyscale. I changed the colours around because we will have a number of NPC’s.
Next, I began researching the alien character. With feedback from the last presentation Henry suggested making the villains somewhat opposite to the good guys so I went and bang looking at inspiration. Originally I wanted to do something to Ben 10 aliens but I wanted to keep the aliens more simplistic as the NPC’s were more detailed and sharp.
I really like the design of solar opposites and rick and Morty so my sketches incorporated similar shapes. I looked at bobs burgers stomachs because I wanted to make my alien a bit curvy and also still taking in ben 10 alien aspects like skinnier arms and legs. I wanted the armour to be similar but not the same so I made boots and want them to look more similar to the ones above than the npc’s legs.
When making the style guide I found that the alien and the npc were too different in their styles so I made the alien a bit more boxy and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
I began making colour pallets on cooler to follow for the art style guides to keep to which we decided on being retro 90’s The game design students were really against adding brighter colours so compromising on retro was a lot for us, their lecturer reminded them that they didn’t have a say in this aspect but it was turning into an argument and I didn’t want their to be a divide this early on so we comprimised.
When it comes to textures I found an image online of what I would like the textures to look similar to, the roughness displayed through less dramatic scrapes, I’m not looking at the colours in the image above but instead the scrapes and damage in the paint work.