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CHARACTER DESIGN
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fredo
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fredo
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CloseSo, I couldn't find any topics about this (though I may have missed some) so I thought I would start a discussion.
I'm curious to see how people design their characters from an aesthetics standpoint. Do you find/make a great sprite and create a character that matches? Or do you come up with a character first, and then create their look?
Whether you're editing rips, making refmap sprites, putting together a vx char in a character generator, or doing your own pixel art - or whatever else - how do you determine what you character will look like?
Is color scheme an important consideration? What about clothing and hairstyle?
I was hoping maybe people would share some of their characters and discussed how that character's look came about.
I'll start with one of mine.
This is Elrich. He is sort of the de facto main character of my project. The game has no real main character (ala FF6) but he is a huge focus of the first half of the game. His concept was designed before his look. His exact bio went through several revisions, but he was always intended to be a noble and a lord. I wanted a look that was regal but still implied an ability to fight. I settled with armor and a cape. The armor is fancier and more decorated than typical soldiers, with gold gilding along the edges to imply that it's more expensive and fancier than most. I felt that the cape helped distinguish him from a soldier or general.
For a lot of my characters, I felt like the color scheme was the most critical - Elrich is no exception. Red and blue are often thought of as regal or governmental colors (they often appear on national flags and royal crests) so I felt like it was a good match for Elrich. He has a different design before he takes his position as Lord that mostly uses drab colors (mainly grey). His character development centers a lot on accepting responsibility, so I wanted a strong contrast between his civilian look and his noble look. He has ginger hair because his family line is relevant to the plot, and it made it easier to identify his relatives if they had a hair color that was noticeable.
I'm curious to see how people design their characters from an aesthetics standpoint. Do you find/make a great sprite and create a character that matches? Or do you come up with a character first, and then create their look?
Whether you're editing rips, making refmap sprites, putting together a vx char in a character generator, or doing your own pixel art - or whatever else - how do you determine what you character will look like?
Is color scheme an important consideration? What about clothing and hairstyle?
I was hoping maybe people would share some of their characters and discussed how that character's look came about.
I'll start with one of mine.
This is Elrich. He is sort of the de facto main character of my project. The game has no real main character (ala FF6) but he is a huge focus of the first half of the game. His concept was designed before his look. His exact bio went through several revisions, but he was always intended to be a noble and a lord. I wanted a look that was regal but still implied an ability to fight. I settled with armor and a cape. The armor is fancier and more decorated than typical soldiers, with gold gilding along the edges to imply that it's more expensive and fancier than most. I felt that the cape helped distinguish him from a soldier or general.
For a lot of my characters, I felt like the color scheme was the most critical - Elrich is no exception. Red and blue are often thought of as regal or governmental colors (they often appear on national flags and royal crests) so I felt like it was a good match for Elrich. He has a different design before he takes his position as Lord that mostly uses drab colors (mainly grey). His character development centers a lot on accepting responsibility, so I wanted a strong contrast between his civilian look and his noble look. He has ginger hair because his family line is relevant to the plot, and it made it easier to identify his relatives if they had a hair color that was noticeable.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=fredo
Do you find/make a great sprite and create a character that matches? Or do you come up with a character first, and then create their look?
These days I always start by designing the story elements, then decide what the character will look like based on those story elements, then hunt down or create graphics to match how I envision him or her looking. I do the same thing for area design, in fact.
In the past I used to just use graphics I had that I thought were cool, regardless of whether they were fitting. Or I would adjust my plans based on what graphics I had available. I try not to do that sort of thing any more because it is a serious compromise of my own creative integrity. Plus it resulted in shitty characters and areas that looked like I took whatever graphics I had lying around that looked kinda cool and slapped them into my game without regard for how well they worked (unsurprisingly, because that was exactly what I did). So now I try not to even look at my graphics folder until after I've decided how someone (or something or somewhere) should look, and I try not to decide how that person (or thing or place) should look until I've at least come up with a basic storyboard.
I'm not sure how long this method will last though, because it takes about one million times longer to do and I kinda hate making graphics.
Dyhalto
7536
Spriting/graphics is one of the easier tasks for me. I let radio/news/lectures run in the background while I work so my mind is occupied even when the work itself is mind-numbing.
That said, characters first, graphics second. I find it a lot harder to work with pre-contrived characters than to just make new ones. And beside that, who wants to have the same sprites as every RPG Maker project out there?
That said, characters first, graphics second. I find it a lot harder to work with pre-contrived characters than to just make new ones. And beside that, who wants to have the same sprites as every RPG Maker project out there?
Crystalgate
694
I'm rather bad at spriting, so my options are rather limited. I do start with the character concept, but I have learned to look for the graphics early, else I get to attached to the image inside my head.
What I find most important is getting a look that matches the personality of the character. With XP, there's an additional condition that the battler has to match the functionality of the character as well. For example, if I want my character to be heavily armored, I need a battler that looks heavily armored. With VX, I can concentrate on finding a face that matches the intended personality.
What I find most important is getting a look that matches the personality of the character. With XP, there's an additional condition that the battler has to match the functionality of the character as well. For example, if I want my character to be heavily armored, I need a battler that looks heavily armored. With VX, I can concentrate on finding a face that matches the intended personality.
Character design has three aspects-
* Visual (designing the look of a character with pixel and/or concept art)
* Writing (duh)
* Mechanics (balancing character to be a useful/interesting addition to the party)
Hence, this topic should probably be called Character Design (Visual). But, I'm nitpicking. As you yourself said:
As long as you acknowledge that all three are (at least equally) important, I will stop nagging and let you get back to your thread.
As to your question, in my early makery I was always able to find a sprite and when necessary face set that I liked, made by someone else, for each of my games. When necessary, I'd make small and clumsy edits to make the character my own. Some of these are abominations, others I'm reasonably proud of, like my changing the sprite I think of as 'Agent Kersh' (A Blurred Line) into the sprite I think of as 'Dr. Cross' (Iron Gaia: Virus) by adding a cybernetic eye and a lab coat. This sprite was, to begin with, from the RM2k RTP Future set.
These graphics were in general rather generic and had been used by others--often, as in the case of the Iron Gaia series, fans who were very talented pixel artists would notice that I was using these kind of generic sprites and offer to do custom pixel work for me between demo and final release. Chaching! Clest and Despain are both awesome badasses whose contributions to my games have been invaluable. Let's not forget Eldritch, where Ocean volunteered to replace the entirety of my game's generic sprites with custom ones, which must have been a massive undertaking since I was just using other people's sprites willy-nilly.
I have, on a few occasions, "designed characters" through WRITTEN INSTRUCTIONS which artists have then turned directly into custom art assets. So I did the design, they did the execution. Good examples of this are Backstage 2 (both protagonists) and almost the entire cast of To Arms! (thanks arcan!). Perhaps those textual descriptions might be of use for this thread, if I can dig them up.
On Everything Turns Gray I used the VX chara maker to make NPC sprites. It was easy and fun! But I'm not sure if it qualifies as character design...unless making a character in Fallout/Oblivion also qualifies.
One thing I have always always had a problem with? Poses. Often I have the base graphics but the artists have vanished into the mists of the internet and for any subsequent edits that might come up over the course of game dev I'm left on my own. Something as simple as changing a character to be holding a different gun or to be kneeling or smoking a cigarettes, etcetera, is a real roadblock for me.
Oh, and battler matching, as crystal gate mentioned (which is also an issue for 2k3, by the way) has also been a problem for me over time.
* Visual (designing the look of a character with pixel and/or concept art)
* Writing (duh)
* Mechanics (balancing character to be a useful/interesting addition to the party)
Hence, this topic should probably be called Character Design (Visual). But, I'm nitpicking. As you yourself said:
I'm curious to see how people design their characters from an aesthetics standpoint.
As long as you acknowledge that all three are (at least equally) important, I will stop nagging and let you get back to your thread.
As to your question, in my early makery I was always able to find a sprite and when necessary face set that I liked, made by someone else, for each of my games. When necessary, I'd make small and clumsy edits to make the character my own. Some of these are abominations, others I'm reasonably proud of, like my changing the sprite I think of as 'Agent Kersh' (A Blurred Line) into the sprite I think of as 'Dr. Cross' (Iron Gaia: Virus) by adding a cybernetic eye and a lab coat. This sprite was, to begin with, from the RM2k RTP Future set.
These graphics were in general rather generic and had been used by others--often, as in the case of the Iron Gaia series, fans who were very talented pixel artists would notice that I was using these kind of generic sprites and offer to do custom pixel work for me between demo and final release. Chaching! Clest and Despain are both awesome badasses whose contributions to my games have been invaluable. Let's not forget Eldritch, where Ocean volunteered to replace the entirety of my game's generic sprites with custom ones, which must have been a massive undertaking since I was just using other people's sprites willy-nilly.
I have, on a few occasions, "designed characters" through WRITTEN INSTRUCTIONS which artists have then turned directly into custom art assets. So I did the design, they did the execution. Good examples of this are Backstage 2 (both protagonists) and almost the entire cast of To Arms! (thanks arcan!). Perhaps those textual descriptions might be of use for this thread, if I can dig them up.
On Everything Turns Gray I used the VX chara maker to make NPC sprites. It was easy and fun! But I'm not sure if it qualifies as character design...unless making a character in Fallout/Oblivion also qualifies.
One thing I have always always had a problem with? Poses. Often I have the base graphics but the artists have vanished into the mists of the internet and for any subsequent edits that might come up over the course of game dev I'm left on my own. Something as simple as changing a character to be holding a different gun or to be kneeling or smoking a cigarettes, etcetera, is a real roadblock for me.
Oh, and battler matching, as crystal gate mentioned (which is also an issue for 2k3, by the way) has also been a problem for me over time.
i have a rather dumb charactor from a game i'm making called "dot detective" (a bit of toung-in-cheeck L.A. Noire) he's litteraly a gray dot. he underwent litteraly 2 revisions:
1. i changed him from black to gray because i wanted to have a black background, and everything that wasn't another human was esintally just a white dot, except for important items which are beige dots and humans which are red.
2. i changed him from a vetran 2-d detective to a idiot who has an ultimatum: if he doesn't completley tank thje next case, he MIGHT not get fired. it's pretty funny.
1. i changed him from black to gray because i wanted to have a black background, and everything that wasn't another human was esintally just a white dot, except for important items which are beige dots and humans which are red.
2. i changed him from a vetran 2-d detective to a idiot who has an ultimatum: if he doesn't completley tank thje next case, he MIGHT not get fired. it's pretty funny.
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