Character design

kimardamina

Hi, I am making a new game and I would like to get you thoughts around the character. Feel free to comment and help make improvement. More details about my game will be given soon! The game will involve Human and animal characters. Do you think it is by anyways going to offend any user? Or even create a dislike of the game?

Chris_Bischoff

Is the character a red chicken? Because apart from perhaps more realistically coloured chickens being offended, I cant see how people would be offended. :)

Chickens are awesome. They need to be in more games. I approve of the chicken!

dislekcia

As a design it seems okay. I'm not really sure what you're going to do with it though, so it's hard to know what to judge it by ;)

Stylistically, I'd say that you're mixing angular and round elements a bit much - perhaps picking one or the other would be better for the feeling of a coherent character in a game. Often game characters are smaller on screen and you need literally 1 or 2 elements that are their recognition factors, anything more than that gets confusing. Like right now, the medal isn't part of the chicken for me, it's a thing that the chicken has clearly earned/gotten from doing something, it just doesn't look like the rest of the character does... So what's your point of "minimal chicken"? (that's a fun question)

Tuism

Firstly, graphic critique isn't really what you need right now, but here goes:

Tiny thin black lines aren't usually a good mix with huge chunky colour. Your stylistic consistency is a bit off between the outlining and not outlining. And yes the medal is totally copy pasted from somewhere else. You can tell. The colour usage is different and the shadows are not matching the chicken's form.

There's also a distinct lack of the 3rd dimension - things aren't overlapping. The beak could have been "over" the line on the left. It could have been overlapping the little... red... chicken... chin thing. Etc. If that's intentional, then cool, but you'll have trouble keeping everything not overlapping and strictly 2D.

But yeah actually, again, graphic critique is completely pointless if you don't have context, and the only context here is "making a game". Which actually says... Very, very little. Make that game first! Prototype! Use stick-things! Drawing characters first never made anyone games :)

dislekcia

Tuism said:

Drawing characters first never made anyone games :)

Truth. At least for me... I have lots of character-based prototypes that never turned into anything.

I reckon some people could argue that coming up with a strong character concept really helped them focus on the game they wanted to make, or a setting that they wanted the game to revolve around, but it's probably not going to help with gameplay. So even if you do have a strong character concept, don't test gameplay with that thing because it's going to take you forever to fully animate that character faithfully each time you change something. Adding hidden costs to iteration like that is a surefire way to not iterate enough and miss awesome potential.

kimardamina

Thanks for your input guys. Actually as a designer and a developer of your own game you game to do everything and I posted this to have more of people's input on the design style used for the characters. I have the game play already and the game itself is moving and you will be able to see a prototype soon and also give feedback. Thank you 'dislekcia' & 'Tuism' for your input mostly because you spoke about the design style which is the reason for me to have posted the character. I agree with everyone by saying that you can t rely on the character to think that you will have a game on. But to have a great game, which could stand as a brand later, it needs a cool strong character to accompany it.

Tuism

Much, much, much, much later in the process. Putting in effort and time in designing the character before you have gameplay is putting the horse before the cart, and every bit of design you do now can mean 10x the work down the line when you discover, through sound playtesting, that chicken is wrong, maybe you need your character to hunt down things because your mechanic is hunting creatures. Maybe you need your character to be able to jump high. Maybe you need your character to slither like a snake. Etc etc. By the time you realise what you want because you finally found mechanics that you A) can do B ) tested well with other people, you would have made a bunch of art assets, put in so many hours in the character design, that turns out to be wrong because you didn't consider gameplay first, and then you'll have to re-invest all those hours.

Design always have objectives. Character design for gameplay IS in service of gameplay. If the gameplay is undefined, then you have a bad brief, and bad brief wastes everyone's time - in this case your own :)

I totally get the allure to go all gung ho and spend time on cool characters and pretty pictures - I'm primarily an artist/designer - but I've spent too many hours on art and design uselessly myself to not say this when it does come up - start with gameplay, start with mechanics, start with constructing an objective and a goal. "Cool Character" is not a real objective. The art doesn't make the game. It can and will change. Spending time on it now is time you could have put into making a game sooner, and getting to the art (final) sooner.

kimardamina

Thank you Tuism. Appreciated and I understand your process which makes sens.

dislekcia

kimardamina said:

But to have a great game, which could stand as a brand later, it needs a cool strong character to accompany it.

Why?

(If that's really a thing, then I'm doing it wrong)

farsicon

I'd love to see a chicken that can hunt, jump high and slither like a snake. There's a game in that right there :)

farsicon

Edit. DP.