Blog 2: High Concept

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 and realizes all his wealth should not belong only to him. He has also developed an ability to communicate

with animals and use them as extra sets of eyes, like drones. Then an alien invasion occurs and he must defend

his home from them and fund other causes in a meaningful way. But funding certain causes might carry unexpected consequences. The player 

would learn about the character in media res; they will start the game as this character and via dialogue choices and cutscenes learn the 

character’s backstory, motivations, etc.

 

 

The Lesson

 

I learned through this assignment that a character is more than the sum of their parts. In some way, most aspects of my

image research found their way into the character. The architecture images I found inspired his rich history as well as the textures on his

robotic limbs, the design of certain leaves became the pattern on his clothing, the sharp angles and lines associated with anger and the shape

of a tropical building led to the design of his head. Also, the window design from my image research of expensive architecture made up the 

textures on his mechanical limbs, and one of the buildings became the design of his knee pads. But without all these factors combined, the 

character would not be nearly as detailed. This shows just how creative character designers have to think. They have to do research that is 

relevant to a character's background and creatively implement those details in a way that looks believable, but also stylized.

 

Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1j7gvP_TlUz0WSnm_85WklIT6FarDEzFz528sOOVsN8Y/edit#slide=id.p