Cosmo Character Creation: 2D Concept Improvement

For the second part of development I will be creating a much cleaner design of the characters artwork so that we can have a more accurate representation of how the characters will look in our game. For this I will be looking to not only improve some of the designs but also add some affects to show how they will fit in the environment, as this is a puzzle game aimed towards children aged 12 and up I will be keeping the 2D cartoon based style of art as this can be used for hub designs, UI and any potential animations and cut-scenes giving a variety between the 3D game play and the 2D story telling factors to make the game look interesting.

From the result of the first half of the project I have drawn over the rough sketch so that it is much cleaner and the look is more defined.

As our character is the main face of our brand I have worked on her facial features more carefully by adding shading and tone to the image to make the colours stand out more and show how light reflects on the character. To make the character more unique I have also added more detail to the helmet to better fit out game style and I have also included freckles to the design to make her look more interesting.

As the characters eyes are the main focus of a person I have looked into a range of different styled eyes and the reference I have chosen creates the perfect affect for a space type game adding a twinkle in her eye.

To the rest of the character I have spent time adding more definition onto the suit by adding a lot of shades to the character, I had used a lot of dark shading with this character because she is mostly going to be seen in space where there are a lot of dark corners and the only light sources is from the sun and space ship.

One of the main ideas we have for this character is the transition that happens depending on her environment, when inside her face will be on show and when out side her face will be covered as a way to be protected from the air and the light in space. For the design I added a light glow to the pattern on the helmet to represent lights that will shine from the suit and as you can see in the first image it has also been applied to the main suit too.

To give the affect that the helmet front it curved I drew some faint white lines to resemble glass and using the ‘Switch between free transform and warp mode’ button so that I could pull the image and bend it into shape.

As I was almost done creating the character, I thought of playing with some effects on Photoshop to see what I could do to the image for fun. I added filters, changed how I did the shading to see what other possibilities there were to make it look better. After I started to add a range of space images to see what sort of picture would go great in the background and then it hit me, I wondered how would these images look on the front shield image so I played with the layer settings and by putting it as a Screen and changing its opacity to 37% it gave a great effect of what cosmos could be looking at in space.

Space image LINK

Once I was happy with that I continued to mess with the image further and though adding lens flares to the design would fit with it perfectly as a lot of people who direct movies set in space use it a lot to increase the light reflecting off of lights on the ships or reflecting off of glass and metal surfaces. With the lens flair I had to use the pain bucket and paint a whole layer black as it could only be applied to a surface and I didn’t want it directly on the character so that I had a choice to move it, to get its final affects I set the lens layer to screen so that it hid all the black and blended onto the image.

For these three images I edited and adjusted the layers for each state to show how the characters helmet would work using mainly the opacity to get the glass affect I was looking for. Below I have listed the states and how it works, each design all has glass covering the characters face.

1. In Space in direct sunlight (Full cover)

2. In darker areas of space (Mid cover)

3. Inside structures and vehicles (No cover)

Once the character was completely finished I created a space background using a range of brushes that allow me to create a colourful affect and speckles of stars, as space isn’t fully black I made sure to use a range of dark blues and I have even added tints of pink to make it look more interesting. I have created 3 variants of this image showing the characters face but as we are only using this design for the character model this is what we are going to be focusing on for now.

Image current uses

With this image and the variants created we have used cropped out sections of the design to feature on the app icon on the store, the games main poster and a few pieces of merch. As its is the most highly detailed image we have currently it is what we have decided to use however, this could change in the future with a male variant of Cosmo and additional other poses.