Sunday, 27 September 2015

Videogame Character Development - Conceptual ideas continued.

Since my last post, I have produced two 'thumbnail' silhouettes, which outline a character's general shape using both provided and resourced material.
These serve a purpose not only to myself but to ask my peers which of the designs they can most relate to if any, and which they feel would best suit the character I have planned throughout this project.


As shown above, I produced two similar, yet differing silhouettes, one of which was designed with a classic cowboy hat and straight cloak. The other was designed with an atypical cowboy hat, flat topped, and a slightly more rounded, flowing cloak.

I took this to some of my peers and got various opinions from people, one of whom immediately pointed out the exposed arm and assumed some sort of cyborg element would be used. As I am intending on my character to have a bionic arm this was completely correct and surprised me.

The opinions I received were strongly sided with the left of my two silhouette designs and as such I feel I will be going forward using this silhouette as opposed to the right hand design.
I also received some ideas as extra to the ideas I had already come up with myself, including weapon and equipment ideas which could potentially be created as further development assets. Inspiration for these peer ideas has come from various places within not just the games industry, but also film and other media based industries.

Following this step I proceeded to create a Character Bio sheet for my silhouette, giving him a name, some characteristics and a short back story.


I initially wanted to fit 'quickdraw' into the name, though through peer analysis and ideas again I decided to veer away from the name as it is a widely used term within the wild west setting and has been used many times before.
Whilst naming my character Eli McCauley, I altered the nickname to "Wildfire" and have given him a middle name also.

Whilst creating my Character Bio, I researched typical western states in the USA and decided on a realistic place of birth for my character, and a real historic location for the character to reside.
This research also helped me to provide a realistic date of birth for my character, as to signify his age at the time events take place.

I created a brief back story to the character which can be viewed above, this provides a little knowledge toward the character and their life up to this point.

I may still create more silhouettes as a means of research, though with the feedback and ideas I have had from my peers on the silhouettes I am reasonably happy with where I am up to this point.
I will move on into further design processes and will update my blog accordingly, regularly updating through each process, character and hopefully, assuming time constraints allow, weapon design also.

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