Character Design

  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...

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...

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...