Main Character

Design Inspiration - Main Character

Following is the design inspiration for the main character we will be working on. Please refer to the feature ticket and the task ticket for more info.

Centaurs

Centaurs is a creature with the upper body of a human and the lower body and legs of a horse. It was chosen due to the following reasons -

• Popularity in Greek Mythology.
• Suits the ancient design style of the game.

Sprite movement inspiration

The movement of the main character will draw inspiration from the following gifs. The movement however won't be as exaggerated and detailed as gif 1 for the Sprint 1.

Design Journey - Main Character

• After the main character was decided upon being a controllable entity, and as mentioned the team decided that a centaur would be the most fitting for the game because of its reference to Greek mythology. Our very first iteration of the centaur was done through paper sketching as shown below.

• Now as you can tell the sketch is drawn in the perspective to be a flat/side viewpoint. And initial rendition of this design was done on illustrator using a 32x32 artboard assuming its in proportion with the enemies and other entities and the first iteration looked as seen below for the right-left directions
• After consulting with the rest of the design committee and the team responsible for map-tile dimensions, all the designers came to the realization that our artboard size (32x32) might be too small so after further discussion and in line with an updated version of the game design guideline doc, we had to scale the artboard to 75x75, this allowed us more room for detail.
• The perspectives for the movable entities like the main character and the enemies were also decided to be flat ¾ view (front facing with a 3D view), and using colors and shading to achieve this. The revised main character entities for all 4 directions according to the updated design guidelines are shown below.

• Color palette used (slight darker and lighter hues of mentioned color may be used):

Body (below the waist): #BE7D4C, #472920, #5E352B, #BE7D4C, #673E22

Body (above the waist): #E6A96F, #7E4E2A, #A5734A, #EDBC8E, #CD8A5F

Leg (below knees): #BE977C, #E0B79B

Head and hair: #271311, #432E21, , #B68152, #DDC9BC

• There was also a necessity to add a darker outline to the created centaur design as upon testing it didn’t seem to stand out well on the map’s background and was inconsistent with the other entities in the game. So, the final revision of the centaur design looked like so

Weapon Design

Design Inspirations

The following images were the main resources of inspiration.

Weapon Exploration & Initial Sketches

After a discussion with the team, we decided to explore long-range melee weapons - specifically axes. As we further brainstormed ideas, we settled to further refine designs #4 and #5.

Initial Pixel Designs

To get an idea of pixel design, these were the first iterations of the weapon.

Final Multi-directional Weapon

Weapon Design Guidelines

• Canvas Size 75 x 75 pixels
• Darker outline
• Colour Palette:
  • Outline - R=51 G=51 B=51 followed by R=77 G=77 B=77
  • Inner Blade - R=128 G=128 B=128
  • Handle Outline - R=66 G=33 B=11
  • Handle - R=166 G=124 B=82 & R=166 G=124 B=82
  • Handle Grip - R=96 G=56 B=19

Final Weapon

A long double headed axe.

Main character & weapon integration #1

User Testing

Main Character Design

Weapon Design

These were the results of the Weapon Design Questionnaire.

Reference

• image
• gif 1
• gif 2