Scenario and Character Concepts

 

Scenario:

This was something I had actually come up with whilst in a lecture, sketching between notes:

- The player character stumbles across a room that they cannot get up to the only exit. They then discover an Acrobat locked up in a room/ the room. The acrobat is the Warden and can climb up to the area to let the player up, but the player must first find 2 keys in order to do so. The player can recover these keys by completing two puzzles:

- One involves combining two items to retrieve it in some way

- The other involves retrieving a code to unlock a drawer.

Once the keys have been found, the acrobat jumps up and lets the player down.

During this the player can converse and gain trust with the acrobat. If I have time I would love for this to affect the outcome in some way.

Character design:

Acrobat Sketch one:

This was the basis for the other two sketches I had done. I had tried to keep her design quite contempory and modern. Out of the three I do like her design best however it has far too many independent things that would be very difficult and time consuming to animate.

This design was more reflective of a prison uniform, and I drew it with animating in mind (keeping as simple as possible). I also toyed with the idea of an eye patch but for an acrobat it would be very much illogical.

This is the design I chose – it retains the basic ideas of the first design but simplifies them – leaving the jacket, hair and scarf as the only possible issues – but any of those can be simplified for the animating process.

In addition to the sketches, I decided to fully colour and line art the character – in addition to making sprites. There are a few kinks to work out with the layers but these poses were quickly generated in around half an hour using the rotate tool in Sai on different layers. Hopefully with the greater control from After-effects animating will be as easy. If so that would alleviate early animating fears immensely.