Character (Boy)

Development

Coming up with what my character would look like was actually the first thing I did. Playing the game 'Limbo' was when I decided to make my whole game with shadows (only a lot more colorful shadows) so I started of drawing my own version of that games main character and developed him from there. 

1st

Since I couldn't just copy 'Limbo' (I could but people would keep bringing it up) I started playing around with the style of my boy, whom I choose leave nameless for the duration of this project.

2nd

3rd

I liked the 3rd guy more but I started thinking that the plain black look was a lil boring, or at least too grim. So my solution was to add something that was a different color, like a belt or a scarf, something that flowed when my character ran. I liked how the scarf looked so I never bothered with the belt.

4th

No.3 guy with a scarf looked good so I was gonna stick with him, only he seemed too old for my liking, so my next brilliant idea was to draw him again only younger. In retrospect it seems like I started out with my own concept of 'Limbo' and ended up with a different "own concept of 'Limbo'" but at least I can justify how I ended up there.

5th

Final Project

Well, I made it through to the final year of university, and to the final major project of said year. Thus begins the slow trudge towards what will no doubt be immeasurable success and universal appraisal. First though I need to make the damn thing.

 Since I'm going at this project solo I decided to make it a 2D Platformer, It's a good genre for soloists and much simpler to design than a 3D project. I'm going to be drawing all my assets instead of modelling them so I made a choice early on not to draw any in detail and instead make them all block colors. It's a lot more time efficient, plus I really like the storybook(ish) effect of it all. 

Character Concept (Slightly Shaded)

Character concept (Plain Color)

Boss Concept

 How much detail I should add to an image is something I'm still debating. Slightly shaded drawings like the balloon would be look good if was used to say, give the impression of something illuminated, such as moonlight etc.. on the other hand though that effect could be easily achieved in unity without having to carefully shade my assets. While I don't think I'm going to include details like eyes for my protagonist, I'm strongly considering keeping those details for the Boss character. One reason being that if everything is ultimately just a plain color, then having a character with lines and eyes will elevate it in importance, and the other reason that this character needs to be clearly visual if something to be avoided.      
  

1st Concept

What assets might look like if not silhouettes

Night Trees

Night Ruins

  

 The first experiment wasn't quite what I was looking for, the colors clash with each other too much, so i figured it would be best if the colors reflect the time of day. If it was midday then the colors would be bright, if it was night then they would be darker etc. The few drawings of foreground/terrain set at night worked better in my eyes due to the color pallet being a lot more consistent in this regard. It also lead me to m final concept below which was sort of a mash up of all the drawings above.      

My goal as of right now is to make 3 levels, one at dusk, one at night and one at daybreak. I probably wont be able to make all three of them but it's a start. The trees looked pretty good as silhouettes so I've decided the majority of the game will take place in a forested area, along with the decaying ruins of once great civilization to add some variety.

 I haven't thought of a name yet so for now I'm calling it something kinda pretentious like..

Final Concept

  

Dull Day

I saw this Painting in a magazine. It was of a girl drawing these animals that came to life and flew out of their page and it stuck on my mind for quite a while after. Couple of days latter I was stuck at home sick on a particularly sunny day. Tired of listening to screams of joy from children playing and the wafting smell of BBQs from outside my window, I figured I'd try out my own version of the Painting I'd seen. My cat (Diego) sorta happened to be there so I drew him as well.

Sea Creature

Phase1

Phase2

Phase3

Water has got to be one of the hardest things to draw I feel, but creatures that live in water are pretty fun to draw. Although the whale like eel thing was fairly simple to draw, painting it was a little tougher trying to blend various shades of blue. The waves at the end were drawing using that really famous Japanese painting as reference and are mostly there just so I didn't have to draw the rest of the body.

3D Modal

Pic1

Pic2

Pic3

This being the first "living" thing I've created in 3D max I wasn't exactly sure where to begin, but eventually I managed to shape and reshape a cylinder in to something that resembled my painting and applied a modifier to smooth it out.   

Alien Landscape

Rocky

Colored

Shaded Rocky

It was only after I was half way through the first drawing that I began to question how exactly I'm supposed to draw extra terrestrial terrain. After all I've never been to an alien planet and have no idea how geometry would be formed in an atmosphere other than Earth's, so potentially I could of just drawn a bunch of upside down ice-cream cones in the middle of a rock that resembled James Cameron and it would have been just as plausible. However I suppose that would have been a little too Alien, so instead I took reference from already existing mountain landscapes (Earthen origin) and just made the terrain more pointed or curvy.

Turret Paint-over

Turret Modal

Paint-over

I feel a little guilty for making the turret brown like every other weaponised technology in games, but to be fair if I had painted it blue or purple then that would have been even less plausible then a mounted hunk of metal that fired ionised death charges at would be aggressors. 

Birthday Card 3

Sketched

Finished

One of the cards I actually managed to finish, and yes he did like it.