Introduction
Hello, IndieDB community !
Welcome to our fifth article of our game: “Bracara Augusta: Shadow of the Past”. Today we are going to talk about our game's main character design.
Character Design - A regular person
While developing our game, we never imagined a story about an adventure where the chosen one saves the world.
Instead we wanted to create a story with a regular person that gets involved in something bigger then what they expected.
Throughout the game the player gets to see how the Roman culture and how they lived ( for example their houses and beliefs) trough the eyes of a modern person and trough the eyes of a Roman person.
The modern person is our main character, 21st century, and the Roman person is our spirit guide, that lived during the Roman city Bracara Augusta's time.
Designing a character vs Game utility
We started our character design thinking about the environment and the narrative of the game.
As we saw before, we wanted it to be a regular person and someone that worked in the cafe. At the same time we wanted the character to be as close as possible to the player so we wanted to make it as gender neutral as possible.
Our first designs came out like this:
Image 1: Character Design: first draft
And at a first glance it was ok but then we noticed that something was wrong.
This was supposed to be a front view, but when we imagined the character walking forward we found out that it would look weird. The head is turned in one direction and the body is in another, the character would looked like it was walking sideways.
It would also raise some concerns with the game mechanics, for example when pushing rocks. Because of the perspective, one arm would look smaller then the other and the connection with the rock would be weird.
So, we continued the character design:
Image 2: Character Design: front views
But now it was the arms that looked weird. The character was also a bit flat but we liked the uneven hair.
And so we continued with more designs, until we reach some that we enjoyed and served the game mechanics:
Image 3: Character Design: body shapes
We ended up liking the character with the arms next to the body, medium sized legs and a more roundish shirt, since it gives the idea of volume.
So, now that we had the body shape we started to work on some details like the hair and colour.
Image 4: Character Design: Hair highlights and border
Image 5: Character Design: Hair shapes
Image 6: Character Design: Colour Studies
In the end we choose the one on the left, in the image bellow. We wanted to give the idea that worked in the cafe, so we gave it an apron, and we gave it a more neutral and bright colour pallet to stand out from the environment.
Image 7: Character Design: Final Design
To summarize, this week we were focused on learning and creating our main character in a way that served the game demands. We still have another two main characters to introduce: the spirt and a surprise.
But we will leave that for another article, in the meantime:
Have a nice week
Stay safe!
Ave Bracara Augusta
