Videogame Character Development - Conceptual ideas

I have been tasked with creating a character for a Western themed video game. I have been granted conceptual design freedom with the only constraint being that the character must feature western aspects in some way relating him to the wild west.

I started by brainstorming and mind mapping my character based ideas, through from the style of clothing he'she would wear to the character type itself, whether they would be of humanoid or extra-terrestrial descent.

From my mind map I started generating mood boards for some of the respective branches, for the Character itself, weapons they could be assigned and bionics, as I intend on giving my character a bionic limb of some sort.

There are features within many currently existing characters which, after completing my mind map, I noticed already possess features I had been planning on putting into my own character. These provide me with inspiration and will influence me going forward as I can take ideas from each respective piece of clothing in design.

With regards to weaponry, I have two main options, I can take either a wild west route and design my weapons based on real life weapons, such as revolvers, rifles and shotguns utilising multiple chambering methods.

I can also utilise more fictional design elements coming from steampunk/sci-fi concept weapons, making use of elements like plungers to replace triggers, nozzles to replace muzzles and valves/gauges for hydraulic power placement.

These weapons are only secondary to my actual character being developed but I will be aiming to produce at the very least an 1858 revolver or Model 1887 shotgun to go with my character, with a possible sci-fi/steampunk twist on the design dependent on the eventual character design in itself.

A major feature of my character is the bionic arm I plan on incorporating into my character, and with this I again have multiple directions I can take the design, as there are lots of conceptual designs for bionic arms that I can take inspiration from.

From the simplistic core features of a more robotic design, to the more realistic, panels design of a sci-fi arm, there are lots of respective elements I can use as influence to inspire me with my own design.

I particularly like the panelled design to a bionic arm as well as the imitation flesh-type arm, with what would appear to be a circuit board of some sort making the arm function, with nodes running down the arm to locations power would be necessary.

I then took two of my most favoured resourced images and created silhouettes from them using a simple colour overlay layer effect in Photoshop, these two silhouettes signify the poses I am likely to want my character in after creation, though some details are extra and can be discounted from the idea such as the shotgun in the right hand silhouette, as this is too modern a shotgun for the western era.

This also has a rough overall description of what I am aiming for my character to be, with his Bionic limb, weapons and overall clothing scheme including a hat and potentially sunglasses too.

There may be certain elements within the design which will be changed or simplified during creation due to plausible time constraints, I will prepare for these speed bumps in advance as I track my time management and will cross these bridges if and when I come to them.

I am happy with my conceptual design for an original character so far, though I am yet to create pencil sketches of character thumbnails to be considered for more poses and general design features.

To summarise, so far I have brainstormed and mind mapped elements for the creation of my character with a solid aim to develop a western type character with an alternate theme mashed in.

I have chose a sci-fi/steampunk genre to mix with the western constraint, though I think the sci-fi elements will be much less subtle than the steampunk elements within my finalised character.

This of course is subject to change throughout the design process and I will update my blog in accordance with updates and changes through the process.