This is just a super quick little post about a new software that I have just bought. I am always more than happy to try out different art programmes to see what kind of effects they have and to see if I prefer any over the others I already have and, luckily this evening one of my fellow students mentioned that the art programme 'Paintstorm studio' was on offer today for £10 due to it being Black Friday. He also posted a video below of all the different bits and pieces the software could do and needless to say I was pretty impressed. The video can be seen below along with a demo animation created in Paintstorm studio.
So after I had bought the software and had a little look at what it was capable of doing either by watching some tutorial videos or madly just going through all the brushes and squiggling lines on the blank canvas I decided it might be fun to try and draw out a character sketch to see if I could do a simple piece of line art in this software. As I am trying to get faster at my digital drawing it was nice to have a little practice with the Paintstorm studio software to see how quickly I could get a simple drawing down and what it looks like when complete. Like Photoshop this artistic programme has loads of different setting and tools to play around with so it took me a little while to find something I was comfortable with but in the end I ended up drawing what can be seen in the image below. I am actually really happy with how this little sketch turned out as I was having a practice of a possible art style I could use for my studio work and I think it looks quite nice. If I have any spare time I might have a go with a couple more warm up sketches in this programme as well as a little practice with some environment art but that all depends if I actually have time to or not.
What is the setting for my candy based characters?
For our studio work project, if you were someone who has chosen to do character design, we were told that the most important thing to focus on is the actual characters and we don't have to worry too much about what kind of game that they will be featured in. However I feel that this aspect is actually quite important as otherwise you are making character with no real purpose or direction and the type of game will actually greatly effect the design process and what you need to be drawing. So I decided, before I got any big design work down that I should have a little think about what sort of game I want my candy based characters to feature in and if there are existing games similar to what I come up with to do some research on.
So originally I had thought about possibly having my game as a 3D animated third person shooter similar to that of the existing video game 'Team Fortress 2' but as I started to progress through my project I really started to go off of the idea of making this sort of game as I was uncertain on how it was going to work or fit my theme. After a little while of trying to think up new and different type of gameplay that would suit my characters I sort of hit a brick wall as I just couldn't think of anything that would work nicely or wouldn't be to overly complicated. It was only when I was speaking to one of my fellow students about it that I came up with an idea I actually really liked the sound of and got excited about the thought of working on.
A 3D fighting game
My fellow student suggested that she would love to see my characters in the style of a fighting game and to be honest I couldn't agree more with her. As soon as she mentioned the concept I started to feel excited about creating characters for this sort of gameplay and knew that this the idea that I was going to stick with and work on. The reason I really warmed to the idea of a 3D fighting game was for a multitude of different reasons which I have listed below:
This type of game will allow each character to fully express their set mood via their movements, fighting style, speech and expressions.
The players will be able to pick and choose which characters they want to play as which makes the name 'Pick & Mix' work perfectly.
I am not fantastic at environment art but with this type of game, which will most likely be a side scrolling 3D game, I can at least get some level design art work done.
Less of my time will be taken up due to the fact that I won't have to be designing different weapons as I would of have to have done with a third person shooter.
There are lots of different existing games out there I can look at briefly for research and I have also already played a few fighting games before so I have first hand experience with them.
I just feel like a 3D fighter would be the best type of game for my character ideas and I think I could get some really nice designs done with this gameplay theme in mind. So now that I have a good idea of what kind of gameplay I want I decided that It would be a good idea to have a little look at some existing fighter games for a bit of inspiration. As our tutors said, the actual game creation isn't the important part of this project seeing as I am focusing on character design work, so I have decided not to do too much research otherwise I will go off on a tangent but just enough so I can get a good idea of what I need to be drawing later on.
I already know of quite a few fighting games so I thought it would be good idea to pick two different games, one I haven't played and one I have, so that I could get a good variety of research and influence. The first game I chose was the 2D side scroller fighting game 'Skullgirls' and this was due to the fact that this game is clearly inspired by anime and cartoons which is something I want to incorporate into my own character designs so I thought it would be a good one to look at. This game was independently developed by Reverge Labs and co-published by Autumn Games and Konami and was released on multiple different platforms on April 10th 2012. 'Skullgirls' is a video game where player can engage in combat against each other using teams of one, two or even three character and the goal is to either completely knock out your opponents characters or have the must amount of health when the timer runs out. This game uses many different game mechanics such as tag team-based combat, character assists, snapbacks, and delayed hyper combos as well as different modes such as story mode, arcade mode, versus mode, training room, tutorial mode, and online play. The characters in 'Skullgirls' are nearly all female and have been quite criticised by the players and fans as being overly sexualised.
There are elements of this game that I would like to incorporate into my own gameplay if possible as they are really just the basics of a good fighter game such as character assists, combos, verses modes ect as well as things like the use on an expressive and anime like art style which are all things that I will need to consider when doing my design work. But overall, this is a 2D video game when what I actually want to be creating is a 2D art book for a 3D side scrolling fighter so what I really needed to look at was a fighter that is similar to my desired concept and the first one that came to mind was 'Super Smash Bros' for the Wii U.
'Super Smash Bros' is a series of fighter games that features the main characters for a variety of different videos games series such as 'Super Mario', 'Sonic the hedgehog' and 'The legend of Zelda' and allows the player to pick and choose which characters they want to fight against each other. It is published by Nintendo and the first original 'Super Smash Bros' was released on January 21st 1999 and the most recent game in the series came out in November of 2014. The game is a little different to regular fighters however as instead of winning the round by depleting an opponent's life bar, to win the player needs to launch their opponents off of the stage and out of the map. All of the 'Super Smash Bros' have very simple controls compared to a lot of different fighting games and a huge amount of character combinations and battle items which the players can use to aid their character and help them win the fight. Every single 'Super Smash Bros' game has been well received by critics and has now spawned a large competitive community and has even been featured in a handful of high profile gaming tournaments.
Both of these fighter style games are going to be really good to look back at for some inspiration when it comes to the design part of my project as they both have shared elements that I would to try and incorporate into my own project. I didn't want to go into too much detail with researching them as our tutor did say we should be mainly focusing on the character and not so much of the actual gameplay so I thank I have got enough basic information down to help influence my work. So now that I have done some research into the type of game that my candy based characters are going to be featured In I can now continue with my sketch work and start getting some more solid designs done.
So after I did some simple research into what colour, shape and light theory was as well as looking into the psychology of how different colours portray certain moods, I thought it would be a good idea to now try and apply some of this knew knowledge into my design work. I couldn't really touch on the use of light and colour theory just yet as I am still in the sketching and jotting down ideas design stage of my project so I couldn't experiment with these just yet, however I could practice a little with the use of shape theory when it comes to designing characters.
Shape theory isn't something that I want to base my whole project around however, it would be quite nice to try and use some of it's methods to help my characters portray their certain moods in some way. So from what I have learnt from this theory is that there are three main types of shapes that are sometimes used to help create characters to help give them a certain feel and these may be very subtly incorporated into the design or actually be the main base for that design. The three shapes that are used are a circle, square and triangle and each of them help give a character design a certain feel. So for example:
CIRCLE - Soft
SQUARE - Stong
TRIANGLE - Sharp
These shapes are commonly used in the character design process used for creating cartoons as creating characters incorporating the use of these three shapes helps to make them more expressive and easier to understand. It's a method essentially used to help strengthen a characters design so for example if you were going to have a happy, friendly character they would most likely have circular smooth shapes in their design but if you were making a character who was supposed to be bitter and evil then they would most likely have sharper more structured shapes added to their design. I have popped some visual representations I found on Google of how shape theory is used in character design below as it is easier to show examples then to try and explain it all in writing.
I thought it would be, to start of my design process, a nice idea to have a little go at just drawing out some very rough 'character designs' that use different types of shapes as their bases myself. As I am still practising with trying to speed up the rate in which I work and making sure I am not spending far too much time on my pencil sketches I made sure to draw at a quick pace when it came to doing these designs. Overall I drew out a page of shape based character sketches super quickly, it took me less than fifteen minutes, just so that I could have a little practice with the basics of uses shapes in my designs and to see what the outcome was. I tried to have a quick go at both anatomy and facial designs and my sketch page can be seen below.
I tried to have a little experiment with just putting different shapes together to see what types of character bodies I could create and I am sure there are hundreds of different combinations that I could have sketched out but I wanted to limit it to only few as I was just experimenting with this theory and didn't want to spend to long on it as it is only a practice study. I also thought as well as having a go at making some figures using shapes, I thought I should also experiment with drawing head shapes too using the circle, triangle and square as influences to see what they would look like. I think that these actually worked a lot stronger than the character figures did just due to the fact that I can instantly tell what short of mood each character is meant to portray just by looking at the shape of the faces. You can easily see that the circular face is meant to be a much softer character than both the triangular and square faces.
Seeing as the use of shapes to create designs seemed to have worked out quite nicely in my opinion, especially with the faces, I think I might try and incorporate this technique into my more official character design sketches which is the part of the process that I need to move onto next.
So now that I have a fairly strong idea about what kind of characters I want to be designing for my candy based studio work project and I have only done a little bit of image research into different types of candies I thought it would be good for me to collect some photographs of the sweets that link to the different characters I have thought up so that I have visual references when it comes to me actually doing some design work. This will also help me make sure that each characters colour palette will fit the mood I have chosen for each. I thought that making mood boards for each character maybe a little excessive so I decided just to pick out 5 main images for each that I thought I could get some good design ideas from and I have posted these below. As well as this I thought it would be a good idea to pick out some colours from each of the images to make myself a few colour palettes which will come in handy when it comes to the design process and I will have a good basis selection of shades to choose from. So now that I have gotten a good variety in my images that I can use for reference work I can happily move into the design process.
