Four: New Designers Approaching

New Designers is but a few days away, but this blog has been quiet so to alleviate that I present a few stills that I have prepared.

  Rendered in full HD quality, and what I have has been tested in a video sequence. Getting everything right and keeping everything clean well however has been nothing short of a monolithic task. This project started a long way, back, as far back as September and to see the outcome now feels exhilarating as the home stretch presents itself.

I also took some time to build a business card. Nothing too flashy, gets the job done rather nicely though.

Character Project: Expressions Practice

  Halloween is a time of celebration, dress-up and parties. I myself spent a little time this afternoon working on expression ideasfor two of the characters for the character project - the hero, and Nian. As one of the components of a character profile is expressions.

  Nian was a lot of fun to draw this time around, I found there was a lot I could do with those big eyebrows of his to express emotion, The angle of the head also helped convey emotion. I attempted to convey fear in 15 and 16 but I think I got sadness out of 15 instead of fear while 16 conveys it a lot better despite both being attempts at the same facial expression. Faces for the her however, was slightly harder due to the the design I had come up with and the fact he was a somewhat realistic human. Tried stretching it a little with 6 but he feels like a definite zone for improvement. Like with Nian, I think eyebrows are going to be a prominent component in his emotions.

Character Project: More Sketchbook Work

    I looked at doing more thumbnails today, this time focusing on the character or characters the players would use to play the board. This idea came about on Tuesday when my character design lecturer expressed that he loved using figures in board games due to their innate interactiveness. Players can use these icons to wander about the village (that makes up the board) to hunt down cards and chase after bad spirits. The use of multiple figurines brings up the question of how many players, whjich means how many distinct figurines are needed.

    4 feels like a fairly balanced number to me, but the number of players won't make the game unplayable if there are only 2 playing the heroes of the story. It might affect how many cards players can gather before Nian show up (still not specific) but in the legends there was only one stranger. 4 is also a good balanced number for the number of characters. 

    I wanted to give the adventurers an enigmatic feel; they'd have been wanderers, Someone unfamiliar to the village so I looked into designing them with a bit of mystery. All four (or maybe not all) could/would be characterised by a bright red cloak to identify them, which could be fun when it comes to designing images of the character in action.

    I also did some passing thumbnails for villagers that would be vulnerable to the spirits and Nian. This contribution to the story provides a window to include them as figurines into the game. What is evident when looking up costume, hairstyle and dress for the ancient Chinese on the internet is there is a lot of preference for bright, well-trimmed or elaborate clothing even in demonstrations of Chinese art. But I'm designing peasants, who most definitely would not be wearing long hair in elaborate buns or walking around in multicoloured robes. Which while great designs if the game was set in the streets of Beijing's administrative district but doesn't exactly fit with the image "rural village in China".

    Now there were cases in the colonial period where natives of foreign cultures were portrayed as dressing in highly elaborate clothing and positively covered in jewelry but that was to point out how "other" these cultures were to contemporary European ideas in regards to what is proper. I don't want to go there.

Character Project: Influence Map

    For my project's influence map I looked mainly at style but also at games that I could use as the basis for my game. The inclusion of wraiths and smoke in the influence map were a development of the idea that cards could be gained by vanquishing bad spirits. In Chinese, the translation of "Ch'i" or "Qi" (the life-force as described in Buddhist teachings) is "breath" or "wind", so it might make sense that its negative "bad luck" counterpart is also related to air. Because bad energy is seen as pollutive, I got the idea of portraying it as black smoke, which in both Eastern and Western cultures is seen as unsightly and toxic.

    I am tempted towards colouring my Nian white, as this is a colour that in Chinese culture relates to death. While I have found images portraying Nian as green, I feel certain this is based off the copper statue that dominates my influence map. It seems inappropriate to colour Nian green as Chinese jade (generally a light green or dark green colour) is and was a highly-desired material in Chinese history, comparable to how gold, diamond or possibly marble has been treated in European aand African culture.

Character Design: Thumbnails and Art Style

    To help my thought processes I decided to do some thumbnailing. Along with these I looked at some art from the earlier eras of China's history to investigate the art-style. "Chinese Art" however covers over four thousand years of history so there was some challenge in narrowing down the art for the era appropriate to the setting. Which is both good and bad as there is no specific date as to when  the celebrations started.

    While making the thumbnails I had considered that maybe I don't have to stick to one particular era. Myths and legends are often told using oral tradition, which could mean that each retelling and portrayal could have been done in a style that reflected the era it was told.

    There's also the issue that the story involves firecrackers which I'm not sure the Chinese had back in 3000 BCE. They've known the recipe for a long time, certainly, but "4000 years before the recipe reached Europe" may be pushing believability a little. Then again this could be the product of oral hand-down as discussed in the paragraph above.