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Blog 4

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  Blog 4: Stereotypes By Payton Grady    The Tropes   Alex Wawro states that “devs should strive to flesh out their characters as real, believable, multi-faceted people, rather than shells which serve a purpose for the player” (Wawro). I chose to redesign the Master Chief from the Halo franchise. There were a few common tropes that I think apply to him: cool helmet, plot armor, and powerful weapons that glow.  Plot Armor   Plot armor is the idea that a character is important to the story or destined to succeed in a way that gives him no weaknesses. While I don’t think this character has no weaknesses,  the character’s backstory suggests otherwise. To tweak this trope, I removed a few pieces of armor from his legs and shoulders to give him some weak points, and bulked up the rest  of his armor. The Helmet   Another trope I modified was the trope of the “cool helmet”. Throughout several different media from superheroes to sci-fi, major characte...
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Blog 3: Shape, Scale, and Colors

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Blog 3: Shape, Scale, and Colors By Payton Grady The Concept This week in class, we discussed how to design a character from gesture and read about physical aspects of character design. such as shape and scale. Solarski makes several visual metaphors in the reading: " Circle : innocence, youth, energy, femininity.  Square : maturity, stability, balance, stubbornness.  Triangle : aggression, masculinity, force" (Solarski) The Sketch Here I have attached the initial sketch I made of my robot character. The idea behind him is that he is trained to be a killing machine and uses all sorts of variations on triangles to convey this aesthetic, as it typically represents aggression. But I also put circular body parts under this armor, to show that there is an innocent personality behind the tough armor. The Color Scheme Having imported this drawing into Photoshop, I began to experiment with the design more. While I am not 100% satisfied with the design, I think it was a faithful a...
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Blog 2: High Concept

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Payton Grady GAM-3432-01 Professor Heagney 6 September 2021 Blog 2: High Concept The Process This week in class, we discussed High Concept. This is the process of creating a character through description. We started by taking miscellaneous words to make a description, similar to Mad Libs and then did image research based off of these. After the image research was done, I sketched multiple drawings of the expression, clothing, architecture, flora, and fauna of the character and its respective environment. Attached below are a sketch of a Hawaiian shirt, an angry gesture (note the sharp, firm angles), tropical architecture, expensive architecture, and tropical fauna.   The Character   This character was originally human male who wears a Hawaiian-style t-shirt with jeans. He comes from a wealthy billionaire family in the Pacific. Having been mortally wounded in a war, his mind was reconstructed into an AI and he sees it as a second chance at life. He is now dealing with trauma a...
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Blog 1: Gesture and the Uncanny Valley

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Payton Grady Professor Heagney GAM-3432-01 29 August 2021    Blog 1: Gesture and the Uncanny Valley Gesture      This week in class, we discussed drawing gesture, which is "the movement that connects the contours, the forms, and the tones" (Proko). In this assignment we sketched basic gestures taken off of the QuickPoses website in the form of a line and scribbled mass afterward to show what it would look like on a different type of character. My sketches are not perfect, but I feel like they show the concept well enough. Out of these three poses, the first one was meant to look almost seductive, the second was meant to be a character holding a gun, and the third was somebody holding a sword. By drawing their gesture and scribble in mass, the poses were the same but the appearance was different and there was less context to the pose, almost changing its meaning. I learned that so many complex character poses are all built on a simple flowing line, and that the ...
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