• Register

Company Colossal is many things. It's epic! It's funny! It's a hybrid tower defense shoot'em'up! it's not finished. But when it is finished, oh my, I have such sights to show you. In preparation for imminent war against the Good siblings' militia, a small band of reckless heroes must escort colossal machines to orchestrate the ultimate retaliation. In doing so, they have a lot of fun, get into a lot of trouble, and save worlds. Currently at 30 levels varying between tower defense and shoot'em'up, there's even a couple of other genres in there, because... storyline!

Post feature Report RSS Creating a Company Colossal Team Member

When your game has a story to tell and the story relies on good characters to drive it. Some planning and backstory is near essential.

Posted by on

Isla, is best buddies with two other girls; Lilly and Jazmyn. These girls live in Forge City and like to enter the bi-monthly mecha battles with whatever scraps they've collected to rebuild Sinclair, their battle-bot. Isla takes on the role of pilot, she's the youngest and has the reflexes and aggressive nature to handle it.

She has skills in DIY robotic engineering, her interests are mechanics and hero comics.
She's sassy, highly energetic, 1.25m tall, and likes her vast collection of hair bows which she is very protective of.

She's very expressive in her face and gestures.

Before I design a character, I write about him/her including their place in the story(game). Once I have all the characters and their plots I write the dialog - how they interact and drive the story. From this their character grows, little nuances, habits, likes and dislikes form.

Then, a character design concept is created!

COMPANY COLOSSAL IslaConcept

[A big thanks to Aaron Alexovich for the character designs]

A voice needs to be found. And that usually requires finding a good voice actor. Someone like, G.K Bowes

Isla VO sample

Then model and rigging. A high resolution version is created first (in ZBrush below) then the mesh is decimated into a more game friendly lower poly version. Face shape blend targets and body rig is completed (in Blender below). This is where it is nice to have the dialog and voice over to reference. Gives an idea of how the character will express while talking.

CCIslaCCIslaRig

Then textured and ready to animate for the cut scenes and in-game stuff. For this game, the characters don't require much in the way of texturing, mostly just a colour and a some ambient occlusion shadowing.

IslaInIntrobot01

After some tweaks and adjustments, and a lot of animation testing in game, she can go about her business piloting giant robots and getting into mischief.

And I can move onto the next character!

Post a comment

Your comment will be anonymous unless you join the community. Or sign in with your social account: