Video Game Character Design...

Spellcasta is a project I worked on for an online video game in which users could battle against each other by casting elemental magic powers via their own phones text messages! Artwork was required to spice up the website and aid as promotional material. The brief was to design 4 characters: Male, Female, an armour-clad 'Shadith' demon and his human form alter-ego. Plus 4 elemental magic images, the 'glass council chamber' and mobile phone art.

Specifications:

• Core target market: 10 – 16 year old boys. Secondary market: 10-16 year old girls and 20+ men
• We do not want the creative or tone of voice to be simplistic and childish. It needs to appeal to both children and adults.
• Comic books – manga type comics with a dose of 2000AD and Tank girl, Gorillaz cartoons. We will want to also develop character illustrations at a later stage.
• The cool factor, urban chic, very loose fitting combat trousers etc.
• Manga / anime style – perhaps with more influence from some of the ‘darker’ types of comics and computer games e.g Devil may cry, Resident Evil, Matrix but also elements to ground it in enough reality that a young British audience can relate to.
• Confident and intelligent, urban dwelling 17/18 year olds
• Have mobile phone – use it as a wand
• Not Harry Potter! – these are wizards that live in the real world and are cool! They don’t need pointy hats or silly cloaks
• To start with we only want Spell images based on the 4 types – Fire, Water, Earth and Air
• Monsters - Shadith and vampire-like version in human form

The Process...

After a meeting with the UK based client and finalizing the details I began initial pencil sketches. Working to the brief was fairly straight forward. A few amendments were required at the first pencil stage, but it was to be expected. Once the drawings were signed off I light-box traced the designs to tighten up the lines, scanned them in and cleaned them up in Photoshop. The re-tracing and Photoshop clean up stages made the line work good enough to colour without needing to ink them. As usual, digital rendering as added and the final works were good to go!

The Results...

Female Spell Casta: Illustrates the process progression from sketch to final design. The female character is cool, confident and stylish. I really enjoyed designing her outfit- it's in an urban club-wear style with a cyber theme. Definitely not too 'Harry Potter'!

Shadith in Human Form: Illustrates the process progression from sketch to final design. I really like this guy- classy, evil baddie with spell casting powers!

Shadith in Demon Form: Illustrates the final design with backdrop. This character's pose needed the human version as basic animation was to be made of one transforming into the other.

Conclusion...

This was a really fun project- just the kind I love taking on where I get to design the kinds of characters I think are cool while being able to work in the style that suited me. It's unfortunate that the game's concept had limited success otherwise I may have developed a further 10-20 characters. If you'd like me to work on your game art, by all means e-mail me.