My group and I had a chat during the first week about what kind of art style we wanted to go for for this project and we were taking into consideration the game’s plot when we decided to pick the art style; however, this was after the Monday class because I had an appointment.
This was the game’s second game plot, as the first one didn’t have a great reception so they were inspired by Over the Hedge and decided to take the core themes from the film and apply them to the game.
Thinking this over and after a call with the game design team, we settled on going for a dark, fantasy-esque style, as we thought it would complement the storyline well. Our team also sent us a few games that they wanted us to take inspiration from.
We spent a lot of time this week doing concept art and throwing around ideas for the game. I created a version of the protagonist.
Our protagonist is a fox character called Fennec, so I tried originally to keep with more traditional fox colours with orange, black, and cream, but I thought with the bandana he looked too much like Swiper from Dora, so I decided to try a more blue/grey colour palette on him, but we decided not to go for this design in the end and went with Katy’s instead as it fit better with our art style, but before this I had started on a reference sheet for the character.
But then I was told the design needed to be simplified a lot more but I went back and tried to make it as simplistic as possible while still keeping the character recognisable.
After a group call and a discussion we decided it would be best if I took on the design of our design game’s main antagonist, ‘The Crow’. I knew we wanted the crow to be a darker version of the main character Fennec if she had given in to her greed. So, when I began my first sketch for the character, I traced the body of a crow because I had never drawn birds before, so I made a few practice sketches.
I threw around the idea that the Crow was hoarding treasure and stealing scrap metal to improve itself, sort of like ClockWerk from the Sly Cooper game series.
But we decided that it wasn’t the kind of character that would fit in the game’s art style so I came back with this.
Before doing this design, we had a group call where we talked about what they would want the crow to look like and they bounced around the idea of him wearing jewellery and this could be indicative of his health so I gave him rings on his legs to keep in line with this concept. As for the ending of our game, we want him to be crushed under the weight of his hoarded treasure.
So with all this in mind, I then created his style guide.
