Hi everyone! We wanted to take some time to give you some more insight into the character we showed off last week. Today I'm going to share some of the process that we went through in making him as well as some of the influences that had a major impact on how he looks now. I hope you enjoy hearing about him as much as we enjoyed making him.
- HELMET -
The helmet was the very first piece of the character we worked on. While our game deals with SWAT tactics, we want to avoid the modern military shooter as much as possible. We needed something both super-hero and police-like, something brutish to serve as the face of a repressive, ultra-violent police force.
It's no surprise, then, that Judge Dredd and Robocop were the biggest influences in making the helmet. Jesse toned down the campiness of those helmets and gave us a something more plausible that preserves our influence's block-headedness (these guys are men of action, not philosophers) as well as their power-frowns:
After everyone was happy with the sketches, we started looking at color compositions. We wanted to cover all the bases of what would look good, bright and vibrant or dark and dreary.
Alex, one of our designers, wanted a distinctly police look, and needed bold colors to make identifying friend and foe as easy as possible. We tried a classic police color scheme:
This image was our first foray into the pixel-art style. It's WIP, and while we know that we're going with a pixel-art style for this game, exactly how it's expressed is something we're still experimenting with.
- FULL CHARACTER DESIGN -
It was time to give this helmet a body. In starting the character design, Jesse had a couple considerations:
1) The police needed an unmistakable profile to distinguish them from the defenders.
2) The low-poly, pixel-art aesthetic we'd decided on works best with angular surfaces.
When sketching the full body concepts Jesse was loose and rough in trying to nail down the silhouette and the style. Universal Soldier and the designs of Trevor Claxton were also strong influences during the sketching phase along with the aforementioned Dredd. Claxton's designs are very utilitarian, something which Jesse wanted to capture in his concept art.
Our game is set in a dystopic near future/alternate reality, but we wanted to keep the character designs grounded. A tactical vest, not unlike the ones you'd find today, was incorporated into the character design.
We hope you liked this short look into our development of the police character. In part 2 we'll talk about how we translated these sketches into 3D models and show you some pictures of what he looks like now. We're really happy with how he looks, and I hope you all feel the same way once you see him.