One of my main reasons for wanting to pursue Game Design is when I was studying for GCSEs, I was given a certificate with a book coupon attached to it, with that I purchased my first game design book The Art of Halo 4. From many years I spent a lot of personal time creation my own characters and stories while trying to change and improve my art style over time but ever since having these books as an inspiration I fell in love with the idea of creating characters for video games. From then on, I have built up my collection of these art books from many different titles and I haven’t only got game one’s ether as Films has special affects too that incorporate 3D characters too to fill in roles people can’t do.
As I'm planning on developing three characters using the theme Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction I will be using The Art of; Alice madness returns, Borderlands 3, The Evil Within, Fallout 4 and Overwatch as my main body of research to develop characters that fit these themes and help my focus my art style into a professional industry standard, fit for games. From the books I chose you can see that each one fits the themes perfectly and some even merge their themes to create an interesting mix of both such as Alice Madness Returns featuring both horror and fantasy to create a unique design.
The main focus of this research is to look into how the game industry develops their characters by seeing what they used as their influence and how they carried out the development process to see if there is any techniques I can pick up from their work such as; level of detail used on the characters, colour concepts, character variety and painting styles. For the next section I will be looking at each book individually to explore their work and see how I could use it in my own creations.
Alice madness returns
For the main style they had based the art work on the creations of American McGee’s Alice using a cartoony based design that was ‘inspired by 1950s illustration and animation’. At the time the game was known as ‘untitled Alice sequel’ as a lot of the game’s art and playthrough was heavily based and followed the original title ‘American McGee's Alice’ released December 2000. Both games heavily followed a style that focused on ‘surrealism, psychosis-bending imagery, and heavily Victorian-gothic influences’ to create a ‘creepy, nightmarish and disturbed’ art style to go with their story.
For the design of their main character Alice, they created her with a silhouette-based intention that ‘she’s recognisable as being the Alice of Carroll and Tenniel’s creation, while having her own distinct “American McGee” style.’ Through the design process of the game the creation of this character was very important to them so they spent a lot of time and effort making changes until they could agree on what is their Alice. The concept artists for this project had free rein to exaggerate the design and use bold features to make her stand out and be unique, as the game travels through many different design levels the artists also had the opportunity to create a wide range of outfits she could use that also multifunction into having special abilities.
From the imagery of this book I can see that what they were doing with their work was executed perfectly and from the sketches and design I can see that a lot of people who worked on this project had their own unique style for developing these characters. From the designs I could also see that a lot of sketch work and painting techniques were used to develop the concept which allowed to capture a dark coloured and gritty sort of textured look to follow the horror theme they are going for and the more bright fantasy placed had a more clean brightly coloured design to capture the wonder in the world. From this I would like to capture this similar sort of imagery for my horror-based character as it inspires me to develop a more mythological design for a creature that could be used within a horror or fantasy game.
Reference: McGee, A., 2011. The Art of Alice Madness Returns. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books.
Borderlands 3
As the 3rd instalment of the borderlands series, the team have been given the opportunity to work with new and exciting features to expand the universe that they have created, as stated in the book ‘every instalment gets a fresh start’. They worked hard with this project to make sure that they followed the work they have created previously making sure its coherent to their universe but keeping their players interested with new content.
In the past developers had their own creation on the character ‘carrying them from inception to their final incarnation’ but this time they worked together to make sure the character design team worked together on their children of mayhem with over seven hundred references to create one. Stated by the lead character artist Kevin Penrod “we have more time to dedicate to doing concept” and that their characters are chunkier in style. One benefit of having upgraded technology to assist along with the development is that designers are now able to take their creation and add much finer detail as the hardware can now represent it more clearly for people to enjoy in their games.
From the information gathered in this book I have found that technology, references and time is three of the main important aspects of creating a character for a game. To do so you need to understand what it is your making and what for as you need to make sure they fit in the universe they are being used in weather it is a new or an existing game creation, as well as knowing how much detail all software its being used on can handle it as it can affect the outcome of the design.
From the design process they were able to gather a wide range of designs when working with a group of others on the project, allowing room for change. When the chosen character was decided they made it clear that it takes a long time to go through the steps to develop them as 3D models and making sure that their techniques used follow the work that was put into creating the concept work, for them a technique they developed to get the colourful and cartoon base look they wanted but with a more interesting use of colours and effects on the materials. This will be one of the most important features I will be looking to create with my fantasy and science fiction-based character.
Reference: Chris Allcock, S. K., 2019. The Art of Borderlands 3. 1st ed. London: Titan Books.
The Evil Within
During the first part of development of this game their initial idea was to skip concept art and head straight into developing 3D characters on the idea that ‘we, Humans, were the scariest creatures of all’ but then soon decided it was a bad idea as they needed the artistic balance of horror to create affective game play. The base of the idea was to build a world as part of a by-product of a human named Ruvik who’s mind was full of madness so in order to do that the concept team worked on a range of creatures and people to fit in that.
When Ikumi Nakamura joined the team, it was said that her work influenced most of the designs developed by the team when she ‘incorporated painful contraptions, such ad barbed wire’ creating a horrific styled look you see throughout. With the designs of these characters it is clear to see in some there the influences come from as one of the creatures called Laura who had a ‘very Japanese-horror-influenced appearance’ which I believe closely resembles the Grudge. The game also fits closely with other fearful characters such as pyramid head and leather face which creates both a unique but a some what familiar setting to the game, creating an environment that leave you on edge thinking what could be worse.
As for the style of the concept work they stuck with using a lot of dark shaded of brown, green and red along with a lot of black to capture that gloom sense of dread the creatures have over the player, to accompany the style they use a lot of watercolour and smear based affects to show the shading that reflects off them and a lot of detailed pencil marks to highlight any important outlines and features. For the humanoid characters each one carried their own use of colours, the cops seen in the game and Sebastian the main character has a lot of normal life based colours that would reflect a sense of normality to the design, Leslie is more pale and has a lot of white that makes him stand out from the darkness that could reflect him more pure being and for the dead they show a lot of scars and imperfections to resemble that. As to what I will use this for I will be using it to reflect my own horror based creations as they are meant to strike fear and make the viewer uneasy.
Reference: Mikami, S., 2014. The Art of The Evil Within. 1st ed. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books.
Overwatch
Out of the books I own this is just one of the many few heavy books that I have that reach to pages numbered to 360+ pages and that is NOT a large open world-based game. Since the first stages of development the concept art team have spent a long time exploring endless possibilities of how their world will work with a range of heroes from different background. Bill Petras wrote about how he saw the assistant art director Arnold Tsang developing sketches to help spark inspiration in his team to set the base style for the game by creating a group of characters standing together, the whole team worked together on the ideas by giving feedback.
‘In Overwatch, heroes are everything. They are the game’s identity, the expressions of it’s core themes and values’. Throughout the characters designs are each unique to them and fit perfectly within their back stories and personality. With one character named Lucio the developers had decided to change the location of where the character was from as he had such a lively personality build around music, that place was Brazil. ‘The country fit well with the hero: it was a vivid and lively place with a proud music culture’ by making this change the stereo type is carried along with this character proudly and gives a fun and exotic feel to the game, especially when the characters abilities tie in perfectly too.
From looking into this book, I can see that the majority of the designs are very clean and brightly coloured but not only do they have a cartoony based design but they are blended so well with their 3D models they look almost life like with a high amount of detail put into them. As for the concept work, I can see 3 clear stages of rough sketches, base colour concepts and a final working of the character allowing for a more 3D affect with details that fit them into their environment such as colour lighting, scars and dirt.
For my work this is exactly what I am looking to produce as I love to design cartoon-based character but not only that, they fit in perfectly with the world and can be turned into 3D models that have a perfect blend. One other thing that I will definitely be looking out to do is making sure that the characters overall look reflects their backstories so that I creates a continuous flow of storytelling.
Reference: Burns, M., 2017. The Art of Overwatch. 1st ed. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books.
Fallout 4
Within fallout 4 the game is set within a large role play based game, for the main character the game developers game people the opportunity to build their own character to play as by giving them a set of listed features to use and a set of sliders that would allow for adjusting smaller details. As this edition allowed for this option, they needed to make sure the mesh was high enough to allow such changes to look smooth, as for the characters around the world each one with an important influence to the story was made uniquely. As for stylization ‘the costume design in fallout is a combination of repurposed pre-war clothing’ setting the scene for the story in the universe.
Even though it has a lot of old-fashioned setting, the game also includes a range of new edge mechanical tech that can also bee seen within some of the characters designs but mostly the robotic beings that also live withing the games world. Each faction in the game also have their own set of style/uniform to represent the power and union they each hold in the world; the brotherhood of steel had a ‘nomadic and militaristic’ design, the institute uses scientific lab coats, vault dwellers have a blue iconic jumpsuit and the gunners use pre-war military armour.
The team working on this project is large and the concept work varies depending on who is behind it and what the theme is of the character. A lot of the base sketches are done in black and white to give a simple idea on what features they could have and the designs follow with various types of props and clothing they have using only simple colours to decide on their options, once the final design has been chosen a more detail look is done in a water colour painting style to also show the differences in tone and texture.
This book has a lot of development techniques scattered throughout the book weather it is concept, storyboards, 3D models or illustrations and each once is useful to use as inspiration for all three tpicts I am looking into. The creatures are great for horror, the cyborgs help to understand how to make detailed electronical designs and fantasy comes in many shapes and sizes depending on the colours and shapes you decide to use.
Reference: Bethesda, 2015. The Art of Fallout 4. 1st ed. Milwaukie: Dark Horse Books.
Prop References
As I am also planning on doing some props for my characters, I have provided some images from the books that I think best represent the type of items I want to develop for them. With these they sow both 3D models, sketches, variants and even a sections of the weapon that is broken down for a customisable option in game.
My Art Style
From the collection of art work I created to practice and improve my skills during the summer, I can see that my style of work mainly focused on using dark lines and bold colours while the shading comes across as very dark with a few times of white to add some light to the designs. As with these creations I used Hero Forge to develop a character and use as a base the proportions come off ash thick in some places such as the bands being quite large and the height being quite short to proportion. The designs are heavily aiming towards a more cartoon style of art work which is what Overwatch and Borderlands focuses towards which is what I want to be working towards however, I would need to work towards fixing my proportions so that they look taller and slimmer (depending on request) for what I'm going to be working towards with my designs.
As for theme my kind of art style does play appt on Fantasy so most of the designs I will be looking towards will have that feature but I will be making sure to aim it into Horror and science fiction by trying to use the evil Within and fallout as an inspiration for how the characters will be created with these two themes, this means avoiding the use of thick lines and using a more sketch based markings. But for Fantasy as I’m using Overwatch and Borderlands as inspiration, I will be using a lot of bright colours and dark lines for this.
For added detail I have a range of artistic brushes that allow me to add particle affects and markings on the character which will be based off the environment they are commonly seen in. With the images I have provided I have used these affectively:
1. This character lives in royalty meaning that she doesn’t have a scratch on her, her clothes use the finest cloths and her fashionable gems and gold shows off her wealth.
2. blind and lives roughly in the forest where she uses the sound of her surroundings as sight. Was once as a beautiful agent of god but was kept by slavers to be uses as source material, plucking her wings dry, was blinded and scared by fire during her escape.
3. A weapon made for war, a soul in a metal shell to protect queen and country but the war has ended 200 years ago. left in storage since, battles scars left unclean and decaying over time, was sought out by people looking for help in the current period.
Based on these backstories I was able to show evidence of their story through the art I created and I will be looking to continue this throughout my work.