Final Character Design.

This is the finished look of CatDroid. Not updated this in ages, as ive been busy working on the game. But I thought I might aswell add it in. One pic is the coloured sketch, and another is the final 3D model. If you take a closer look at the 3d image, you can see the finer details, such as the fingerprints on the head and body and the soft, thin look to the headgear. Gives it a nice plasticine like appearance.

Character Sketches.

Got four main ideas for a character here. Ive added different features and designs for each one. Ive sketched them to try and be simple and to keep within the cartoon style of the character and game. My next step will be creating a final character design with keeping the best features of these four drawings. I will also be uploading the coloured versions of these sketches.

Orthographic body sketch.

This is a sketch of the main body frame and shape. I will upload the designs based on this within the next few days. Ill also have a UDK video up soon, showing my progress.

Character ideas.

This is an old pic, but I thought id upload it on here anyway. Got a few doodles and sketches to see what sort of look I wanted to go for with my character. It was initially about having a cartoon looking cat, with simple mechanical features, such as cog earrings, wire whiskers and metal plates on its face. A very early design as can be seen the robotic head on the right shows that, I had at one point thought of making the characte completely robotic, but its body catlike. Good concept sketch of how I wanted to go about it anyway.

Silhouettes cont.

Got a basic silhouette design for my character. This is only the basic 'flesh' and shape of CatDroid however. I'll be adding, changing and modifiying differnt aspects and features of him. Maybe some different shaped eyes and adding more robotic, metallic parts to show he is part robot. But this is what the main body shape will look like. Heres one of him in full black, and a light white.

Silhouettes.

Been a while since ive posted anything up. Just finding the time to upload some of the research and sketches I suppose, ive been crunching out some UDK stuff an all, gonna post some progress on that soon, but i'll talk about design stuff for now.Trying to come up with a final design for my character had proved to be a lil tricky. I knew what I wanted it to look like, however, I kept checking things out that I thougtht would improve or be a better design choice. It is indeed very tricky to create a 'simple' looking character. I looked into various different character silhouettes to see how they stood out, by simply glancing at them. Most of them are easily recognisable. They have the key features I want for the look of my character, large feet, the big head and smaller body. A few distinguishing features are also present, such as Sonic's spikes, Mickey's ears and Rayman's head etc.

Next up I plan on finalising the design of my character and looking into colour schemes. I'll also be looking into enemy characters, that fit into the games visual style. 

Simplicity in sidescrollers.

Got a few pictures here of the 3 main side scrolling platform games that inspired me. Everyone knows who Nintendo's Super Mario is, and has at least played one of the games he has starred in. The same could be said for Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog. This game New Super Mario Bros. had the playe taked with getting to the other side of the level, running jumping and avoiding or defeating enemies. What was unique about the DS version is that, on the second screen displayed a 'progress bar' which shows how far the player has progessed in the level. The levels in this game were fast, smooth and could have been finished quickly. Just by having this progress bar, it is implied that the main goal of the game was to get to the end of the level. The simplicity of having an objective such as this, is something I would like to create for my game project.

Another Mario game to look at which would be quite useful for art style more than level design would be Yoshis Island, the simple almost hand drawn art style makes the game appear simplistic and uncomplicated. Things such as the background environment, mountains and trees are similar to the type of style that I want to create. Casual and Cartoony.

The same can be said for Sonic the Hedgehog, which is even more of a simpler gameplay goal. Race to the end of the level! What was also interesting about Sonic is that his jump was also his attack, which allowed to player to persist and continue playing thorugh the fast paced level, jumping and destroying enemies along the way.