Before we knew what type of game we were going to do, we all came to the agreement straight away that we want the characters to be 2d and the environment to be 3d. I decide to look up a bunch of 2.5d games that we could use as reference.
Paper Mario: the thousand year door
Bug Fables
Paper Mario The Origami King
Subway Midnight
These games gave us ideas that we wanted to go with a goofy anatomy for our characters such as rounded shapes and big heads.
By this point, we figured out that the game would take place inside of a whale and the first thing that came to my mind was Mario and Luigi bower’s inside story.
The game has a lot of visuals of the insides of bower without making too gross by using a variety of colours.
I also found these references on Pinterest for what the characters will look like as we want there to be a few anthropomorphic fish like people. All of our references were quite similar as I like the idea
We also want the main character to be human with some sort of helmet. I like the idea of the helmet having fish like elements to it.
We decided to go with the wacky art style, so I made a few doodles for some possible character designs.
I decided to look at some references such as Cuphead and mickey mouse rubber hose as my style in the doodles wasn’t very consistent.
Looking at this art style, I can see that none of the characters have any sharp edges, have noodle like arms and the only thing that’s allowed straight lines are the limbs as the faces and clothes lines are all rounded.
using this reference, I decided to redraw my fish characters with the body types and rules.
I really like how my characters turned out as they all stand out from each other but I feel like I’m following too closely to actual rubber hose style instead of making my own style. I do really like the rules of the arms and legs
Using my research, I made a sheet explaining how the limbs work as I feel like that’s the most recognisable element to rubber hose and I wanted it to be the most clear thing. I only did the reference drawings for the fish people while Joyce did it with the humans.
We decided to give the characters a simple bean shaped torso and I want to see how far I can exaggerate this rule to make the characters stand apart from each other.
I really like how these drawings turned out as they all look different but you can tell that they’re all drawn in the same style.
Me and Joyce wanted to see by following the guide, if we could be able to draw a character the same. When we did it, even though we both gave him a slightly different body type, the face of the character almost looks identical to each other.
I experimented with different shading styles to see which one looks the best. I only want one shading colour as to not complicate it so the colour had to work on most colours. I like how the dark purple overlay looks but I realised it didn’t work on overly bright colours.
I made the yellow darker and t worked out better. We decided that we’re going to be using more saturated deeper colours and staying away from light and pastel colours.
As the inside of the whale is going to be red, it means that I had to make the colours of the fish stand out from it.
We decided that we want the fish characters to be blue and blueish green. I looked up a few colour palettes and saw a lot of reds and yellows that looked really good with the blues. The rules were that the fishes body is blue while it has red and yellow highlights.
Here’s a test I did with the colour and shading it looks very well.
Links
https://medium.com/@letsgospaceman/a-beginners-guide-on-how-to-draw-in-rubber-hose-style-c1ff1076eb30#:~:text=The%20rubber%20hose%20technique%20involves,minimize%20the%20complexity%20of%20joints.