Model and Character Sheet preparation

The past few days have been full of experimenting with various different elements until the final character was completely designed and ready for the Model/ Character Sheets.

Lantern design

Early in the conceptual stage, after creating the silhouette with the hanging lantern, I began to research and sketch different lantern styles. I returned to those sketches and created a Hybrid, should the player have a hanging lantern attached to their hip:

Bag design

I knew for the character a messenger bag would be most suitable so, like with the lantern, I sketched a few designs before creating a hybrid of the three:

Jacket design:

I felt that the basic Jacket the character wears was perhaps too simple so researched several different jackets; sketching a few before colouring them. I lined them all up and altered the hue and saturation to find the design and colour I wanted for the model/ character sheets.

Facial expressions:

Given how bad the frontal image of my character had turned out in the colouring practice I created several faces based from the successful character sheets I had made earlier. However I felt there was something that wasn’t quite right with the length of the hair so experimented with a shorter hair style and also on a design that lacked a scarf. After speaking to a number of people I decided on keeping the scarf, but having the shorter hair.

Bag logo design

This wasn’t something I had thought about much, but I wanted to give the character a bit more depth and the way I was going to do this was via the space on the protagonist’s messenger bag. The thoughts on the characters profession had changed quite drastically since when I was considering a freelance journalist and had moved towards a trainee doctor/ nurse. Because of this his hospital’s logo seemed suitable, but I didn’t want the nature of the logo to be too obvious that he was a doctor – as the protagonists details, like those of the other NPC’s in Zork, should be something that can be discovered.

I looked at a few different hospital logo and themes that I could have based the design around before settling on the theme of ‘Icarus’ – the character from Greek mythology. Of course the role of Icarus is a tragic one – flying too close to the sun and melting the glue on his paper wings, but I wanted the wings to be the focus of the design, and be something that is shown in some way in the design or on the player’s badge. This would be more for the connotations of angels and in turn Benevolence, hinting that the character can be a good person. Conversely, when the player becomes antagonistic, that badge would be ripped off in the final act of whomever the player kills to become antagonistic, creating a tear in the beanie, revealing messy hair that sticks up in the shape of a horn.

I did a few basic sketches of the design, before bringing it into Photoshop to create the final design.

Now that I have completed these steps, I have a settled character design that I can encapsulate in my model sheet and from that my character sheet – both of which are my next goals.