4/28/14 - 5/4/14 Hi there ! I'm Liz Pulanco, the Character Artist and Animator on Twoneironauts. In this post I'll be talking about my first pass at the characters in our game, specifically the ones you can play as, along with some of my thought process while going through it. Let's get started ! Since Twoneironauts is a sequel to Radio Galaxy's freshmen game, Oneironauts, one of my first thoughts was that I didn't want to stray too far from the initial style when redesigning the characters. Despite the fact that we'll be going from pixel art to 2D (for lack of a better term), I still wanted the characters to be recognizable. Here's a screenshot of Oneironauts, showing some of the characters: So because I wanted to use a similar style, my thumbnail exploration was rather short, as you can see here... After two (or technically four) attempts, I did my own rendition of the original style, and stuck with it from here on out. Probably not the best thing to do, but I'll address that choice in an upcoming post. I then drew all four characters in this style, making slight changes as I saw fit. For example, the boys were just recolors of each other in the original game, so to differentiate them from each other I changed the second boy's hairstyle. That's where I got the idea to tell the characters apart from their hairstyles rather than their build, which was something we had talked about before as a team. Other changes were adding sleeves to the girl's nightgowns, along with drawing a version of them in onesies, just to see how it would look. After talking to Trent Reed, our Designer, about his choice of the boys wearing onesies and the girls wearing nightgowns, I learned that Wendy from Peter Pan was a source of inspiration for the nightgowns. With that in mind, I did a few iterations of the design, the team choosing to go with #2. Another thing we decided we wanted as a team for our game was to have a variety of pajamas to choose from, or unlock throughout the game. We liked the option of customization in other games, whether it was color changes/palette swaps, clothing, or accessories, so having different pajamas was a natural choice. We came up with a few ideas for different pajamas while brainstorming and I explored some more with the following thumbnails, making different versions for the boys and girls when called for. The Demon Drum and Plume pajamas are callbacks to games members of our team have previously made, and would also be a nice DigiPen Easter egg to have. One thing I tried to concentrate on when doing these thumbnails were the silhouettes. Surface detail can always be added later, but if someone can't recognize what they're looking at instantly, that's a bit of a problem. So keeping things clear and easy to read is always a good thing to remember ! After the team gave feedback on what I'd done so far, we found the things that members didn't like or found weren't working very well. The top three things were the second boy's hairstyle still being too similar to the first's, the character's proportions being off for people, and the style of the eyebrows. I did some iterations addressing these issues and came out with these thumbnails: Making different version of the boy's hairstyle was tricky for me, mostly because I honestly don't draw boys nor their hairstyles very much ! Looking at reference, I didn't see many appropriate short styles, so I tended to lean towards shoulder-length styles, which I thought worked well as contrast. It was pointed out that this made his silhouette read more as a girl though, and in the end we stuck with the original hair. The biggest issues with proportions was that the characters looked too tall. After creating some measurement lines and finding out how many heads tall the characters were, I then shrank them, finding that 2 1/4 heads tall was probably as short as we would want to go. For this one, we felt that 2 1/2 heads tall was best. The original eyebrows are how I tend to draw cartoony brows nowadays, and thus were the eyebrows I chose to use. Some members suggested no eyebrows or line eyebrows in the feedback, so I tried those and a few others out, along with whether they were "over" the hair or "under." We decided that "under" line eyebrows were best ! I put a note contemplating if each character could have different eyebrows, to individualize them some more, but now that I think about it, it would be pretty much unnoticeable in game, haha. Sometimes there are details that you really don't need -- you just have to decide what those details are, which can be tricky sometimes (although not in this circumstance) ! The last thing I did was collaborate with Kiem Lam, our Environment Artist, on some game mock ups ! Kiem created the backgrounds and I drew and overlayed the characters, Trent coming up with the original layout. In terms of the actual art style we're going for, we were looking at the games Castle Crashers and Guacamelee for reference, which can be seen in these mock ups. We decided to move towards the lineless style in the end.
That's about it for this week ! Hopefully you enjoyed having some insight on my process, the game and the team in general. Feel free to ask any questions or leave comments, and if you'd like me to explain something more, feel free to let me know. :) Professor Feedback for the art in this post can be found here.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
April 2015
Tags
All
Production BlogPosts by our team members. |