2.5D Sidescroller Update 5: Player Character Design

Darn it, I wanted to graft over the past two weeks but moving out of my student halls and getting the internet back at home slowed me down a little. Anyways I finally got my computer up and running with the internet yesterday. In the time I didn't have a computer I had been messing around and drawing some potential character designs in my notebooks so I would have an easier time getting straight to modelling the character in Maya. I've never attempted to design a female character before, all characters I've designed before were male, so this time I'm gonna try and make a cool female character. Here's a couple of the sketches I did...

This was the first one I drew, there was no real thought or reasoning behind why she looks this way, I just drew whatever came into my head. Steph seemed to like the design regardless, so she drew her own version of the character on the bottom right (which looks miles better in my opinion I can't draw to save my life)

This was a touch up of the previous design while mashing ideas that Steph got from my original drawing. The small circular objects next to her head in my drawing was supposed to be her ears. But Steph thought they were large pearl earrings, which I liked the sound of so I gave her earrings in the redraw. The other things I took were the hair design and the cartoony eyebrows that float above her fringe.

This was the second design I did. It retains the bangles that the previous design had around her arms and legs, however this character doesn't actually have arms. She had a Rayman thing going for her with the floating bangles indicating where her arms WOULD be if she had them. I liked the dress that I gave this one, however I didn't like the face too much. Was too...anime? I dunno, just wasn't a fan. Also I just realized I gave her literal Bart Simpson shoes.

No difference, she stole Bart's sneaks, I didn't even notice.

Moving on, I tried to design a cute monster/mummy character. I was really set on this idea for a while, I was thinking about the opening level and how she could climb out of her coffin at the start of the game. I could design a spooky level, one of my favourite level themes. In the end though, I couldn't draw the character how I wanted them to look, not only that, but if I were to model a mummy character it might be tricky to do and her loose bandages would have to have some sort of physics on them to sway around in game. I still like the idea of this one though, I'll come back to it in the future.

This is just...a clown? Felt like drawing a silly clown and seeing if I could get anything out of it. Didn't get much though besides a laugh.

Here's a cute face. She should of had a body I'm sure, but I was drawing this on a train and my stop came up. I liked the simple, cute face I drew for her though and would keep it in mind for when it came to the final character design.

Here's the work I did yesterday. I made a start to 3D modelling the player character. I was aiming for a mixture of my first design and the one with the dress I liked. I kept the bangles on the arms and legs and gave her large puffy boots similar to Mickey Mouse's shoes. Overall I'm very happy with this design and I'm going to finalize it like this. I experimented with different hair colours and I liked the brown haired one the most.

Before finalizing though I did experiment with different colour palettes. I like the purple one but not too sure about the green and blue one. A cool idea though, if I end up having some extra time at the end of the semester, I could put in these colour palettes as bonus costumes for the players to decide what colour they like the most.

With the character design finalized I planar UV mapped the characters face so I could easily draw her a face. This time I would like my character to be more expressive, so I decided to do a bunch of different face emotions that will change given the context of gameplay. Here we have... Happy, Neutral, Neutral (Mid-Blink), Neutral (Blinking)

Idle Curious 1, Idle Curious 2, Idle Sleepy, Shocked.

Angry, Determined, Cheeky/Cocky, Taking Damage.

Defeated, Injured 1, Injured 2, Panicking.

And that's all I have to show for character design. She is all finished now so next I move onto rigging, painting weights and animating. I should also think of a name for her (which is always the hardest part).