26th May 2015

Working on the video for tomorrow presentation and hope to impress both Laz and Alex. Still this not what I wanted to talk about.

During the last critique, Laz was saying I need to be more descriptive in the blog on WHY the character and the world end up like it is now. So here goes (again do note that this artstyle didn't just come in a day in fact it  took me appx 4 months or more)

Early stages Concept

The early planning stage itself, we already knew as a team that we wanted to make a vibrant-cartoony-looking game which artsyle closely follow Disney big Hero 6. Another reason was due to my own personal liking from the Pixar The Incredibles created by Brad Bird. and the other members obsession with the anime Air Gear. We compromised and I start sketching out drawing which looking at it now, it make me goes "WTF" and shocked how much the character changed compare to it was first initial planned up.

"WTF ART 1,.1"

"WTF ART 1.2"

We did actually follow the advise by Laz and Alex to look at other alternative style such as making things more realistic etc, still we believed this style work best due to the time we had and skills that each artist had. Still we decided to stray away from "toon shading" style after Alex was reminding us how does this make us different from the other game out there which were more well known and polished.

My initial blogging shows how I came about with the main character look, I was actually planning his character traits first before I actually designed him pieces by pieces.

Character Traits: Confidence, playful, childish and obsessed to get his love known

This are his traits and I was deigning based the main character based on this traits.

Early days Tecca

The color palette was later change to red, yellow and black to make him more stand out from the crowd, to give a distinct look for players and viewers alike, telling them this dude IS the main character in the game.

Mid Concept

The world was planned in terms to make the character stands out. Simple and as i mentioned earlier, vibrant looking. It fall nicely to some of the concept I shown in the blog at the earlier stage. It was meant to be a "Boxy" busy world with cars moving around and area where players could glide and do tricks anywhere around the game world. There still a lot of stuff to work at but the current build we were doing starting to show the initial concept ideas. What we lacked is artist. Currently there's only me and John who were doing this texturing and it is really hard. John isn't much of a 3D artist as well and I am pretty much doing and planning stuff ahead so he could then match the style intended. This is the reason why we had so many initial texturing problem at the earlier stage, not until i show how to fit 1 building to the gameworld that he start to understand on how to get those assets up.

Initial concept proposal to the team

How the game look now

If you remember looking at my previous blog I was describing 2 other characters as well. A girl and a mask dude. HOW ARE THEY DESIGN? Simple, I was referencing everything back to the main character.

Risa - Main character love interests (thus his obsession)
Mask (Not given a name yet) - Is a character who were actually designed to be his close friend but soon become his rivals as I found him to be too cool later on.

Character Traits (Risa): Obnoxious, self-centered individual, assertive and always thinks she is better than anyone

First look

This is how she actually look like initially when i first actually talk to Stan, this is how I portrayed her in terms of design after our first discussion on how to attract other artist to join us.

She came along way in terms of design as she lost that "friendly" look but the goggle still stays with her

Character Traits (Mask): Secretive, mysterious, powerful yet dumb

Hmm..I have to admit I design him with the thought of "holy shit i have to model 3 diff character faces!" thus that the reason of the MASK. LoL. Strangely enough I like him straight away on 1 design. There's a little tweak here and there but nothing major. If you realised his hair was based from the villain in The Incredibles. His color palette was simple as well; a direct counter to Tecca

The final character was designed by John so I could not really described how he came about making her. All i knew she seems to fit pretty well with the Mask character due to her lolicon look

Johnson initial concept

Switching John's character to fit the style of the game

Mask man

Risa

tecca

Thats it! This was how I designed all the character and game art to fit accordingly to the style we had set earlier. It certainly go a long way in terms of how the character was initially planned to what they look like right now.