Hello, indieDB Community!
Welcome to the 7th article about our in development game, Nata.
If you want to find out more about our game, check out our other articles on our indieDB page.
In this week's article we're going to show you Mara, Nata's main character, final design as well as the process behind it. Small reminder: Nata is a 3D game, but all of the game's concept art is in 2D, since its easier this way to explore different ideas and concepts.
The idea behind Mara's character
Almost all of Nata's characters are suppose to be Macanese animals and obviously Mara wouldn't be an exception. For this, we decided that our PC should be a bird because we wanted to reinforce the idea of the PC coming all the way from Portugal to Macao just to open their own bakery. So a bird, specially a migratory bird, would be a good way to show this concept in a subtle way.
In the Macanese birds category we liked particularly the barn swallow, so we decided to chose it to represent Mara.
Thumbnails
These were all of the thumbnails we've made for Mara. Having these base thumbnails, it was time for sketches!
Sketches
These were the sketches we've made for Mara. We've ended up choosing the 1st drawing from the 1st image in the 2nd row.
Colour Studies
Now it was time for the colour studies, these were the 4 colour studies we did. After talking to the professors we ended up with the 3rd one - the cooler.
Outfit Studies
And last but not least, our main character's outfit. Since Mara is a playful, clumsy, air-headed, chill bird we wanted to pass this idea of her. For that her outfit must reflect her personality. In the images below we have the different options we created.
We created polls in our studio's social media accounts so our audience could help us chose Mara's final outfit. Those polls combined with our professors advices, helped us come to a conclusion - that Mara's final design is the middle one.
Mara's Model Sheet
After deciding Mara's colours this is her final design.
We are really happy with how Mara came out! What do you think of her?
Well, we reached the end of our 7th article!
Next article will be focused on Nata's 1st prototype.
See you next week!
