My Game Design Process
With my coding experience, I decided the best thing to start my first game would be to design the characters. Personally my favourite part of a game is collecting characters or skins. If there’s nothing aesthetic for me to look at while playing, I’m not willing to play for very long.
Character Break Down
To keep my characters unique, I decided to split them into 5 different categories.
Royalty
To them skill comes naturally, if you consider years of combat practice natural. Their fighting style is elegant to say the least, but with so much power behind each move, even the smallest member of royalty can do some serious damage
Chaos
Brute force is often the solution, however their clever personality allows them counter even the most calculated plan. Their weapons are menacing and highly damaging, but might not last as long as you’d hope.
Science
They may be strong, but that doesn’t compare to the super natural power of the other classes. They use gear to enhance their strength and help those in need. If their communities are challenged, they will stand up for them.
Nature
Their powers are strong, but relying on the power of the sun, it takes them some time to recharge. Their weapons are hand crafted, but they are not to be messed with. Generations of perfecting their craft makes them a difficult enemy.
Misfit
It takes courage to go against the grain, but you’ll forever be an outcast. This forces a misfit to grow their confidence and strengthen their skills. This confidence makes it difficult for them to miss, but the damage they deal is minimal. They focus is the long game with lingering damage.
Rough Drafts
Design Process
Clothes are a vessel to project someones inner beauty. You chose what people think of you at a first glance by what you wear, so designing outfits is important. I often draw one piece that you’re meant to focus on and then surround it with accent pieces to match.
This process is difficult, so I made a simple template to quickly sketch on. This allowed me to focus more on the outfit and to quickly make changes to it.
To save time I also started making them all symmetrical. In the final versions I intend to change that for the characters who need it, but since my focus is the characters. I need to make as many as possible.
When I started sculpting, I realised I needed to have more of the face details planned out and to have a more solid muscular structure to make rigging easier. So I made this version of my template.
After the sketching process, I went back and recreated the original outfit for Kristin giving it more details and shading to help me understand the depth of the clothing. I also added some shoes, since Kristin is meant to be an Ice character, snow boots seemed like a good fit.
I still want to keep a lot of the details simple, because I want to keep the polygon count low when I design the 3D model.
3D Modeling Process
Using Blender, I then started the sculpting process. All of my drawing are based off of the same body, so I made a 3D model based on my drawing template.
I used a skin texture on the photo to the right, but I’m not super fond of the look. I would rather have a more anime or painting looking character, so I start messing with the toon shader. Mixing the skin and the toon shader allowed me to have some texture on the skin, while also keeping the character design simple.
Another issue I came across with was rigging, the legs were much too thin to transform with the rig properly, so I had to widen them out using the blender sculpting feature.
Using Marvelous Designer I made patterns for all of the articles of clothing that were on the character. I have a lot of familiarity with tailoring and sewing different articles of clothing, so I was able to freehand the designs.
I noticed that the renders from Marvelous Designer were not as clean as Blender, so I exported the clothing and moved it into the project with the 3D model.
All I had left at this point was the hair. I really wanted to have the hair be as simple as possible, since I wanted the character to look like an anime figure, I wanted to keep the hair in solid bunches that had some definition. So I used the curve object with a funky sphere to extrude from and I got this interesting hair look.
Finally, I combined all of the elements together and after a 30min render, I got this final object below. There were still some issues with the texturing, but for my first attempt, I was happy with the results.
