Blog Post 3 ♡ I Think I Should Be A Fashion Designer :0

 Introduction

In this blog post, I will show images of some of my best gesture work in the last week. discuss Shape Language, scale and color palette in game design, and directly relate it to my original character concept. I will also showcase concept art for my character.

Gesture

Character Shapes

There is psychology behind what basic shapes are used in character design, and it is referred to as Shape Language. Shape Language emphasizes that certain shapes give off visual queues, and can in turn represent different ideas and feelings. For example, squares give a feeling of maturity and stubbornness, circles represent innocence and friendliness, while triangles feel aggressive and strong (Solarski, 2013). Shape theory is used quite often in character design, and the viewer will unconsciously make assumptions about characters based on what shapes are used. For example, Ice King from Adventure time has a lot of triangles on his body because he is an aggressive villain, but his body is round because he’s actually a big softie underneath his exterior.

The major shapes of my character are a square-shaped head and a circular body. I intend to keep the shapes this way, as I feel like they represent my character well. The square head alludes to her stubbornness, as she doesn’t listen to her elders’ warnings about leaving her small village, and ventures off to the forest alone to look for adventure. Her circular body represents her innocence, as she has never ventured beyond her village and doesn’t know how dangerous the real world can be. Her triangle ears give the feeling of strength, but as this isn't a "defining" feature of my character, the ears are not very big compared to the rest of the body.

Scale

One of the first steps in figuring out in-game proportions and scale is to figure out the game’s tile size. The tile size can be measured in the world units (inches, meters, etc.) or in pixels, and it should make sense for the game’s content and screen size (Sivers, 2016).

The second step in figuring out scale is to measure head-height. The head-height is the size relationship between the character's head and the rest of the body. An average realistic human is about 7-8 heads tall, and features subtle expressions, realistic movement, and a serious mood. However, most animated cartoons are between 2-6 heads and have more exaggerated expressions, cartoony movement, and a playful mood (Sivers, 2016). It is important for the designer to ask themselves if their character’s focus should be in their body and movement, or their face and expressions.

My character is meant to be small in size and a bit wide. I feel like this gives a more comfy-vibe than if she was tall and thin. Since she is a cat, she will be about the same size as a regular cat in the real world. This will also help exaggerate the contrast between her and the tall, looming trees in the environment around her.

I took some time and messed around with my character's height and body proportions. Characters with a lower head-to-body ratio tend to have exaggerated expressions and cartoony movement, while higher head-to-body ratio characters have more subtle expressions and realistic movement (Sivers, 2016). My character’s head-to-body ratio is about 1:1.5, so I tried to shrink and stretch the body to see how that changed a viewer’s perception of her traits. When I made the ratio 1:1, I noticed that my character looked a lot more innocent and playful; when I stretched the character to a 1:2 ratio, she looked older and more serious.

Color Palette

Colors are one of the most important parts of design in games. Colors can lead the player’s eye, set the tone of the game, and also give clues about a character and the world. For example, red is associated with strong emotions such as lust, anger, and love; purple represents royalty, luxury and nobility; green showcases nature or feelings of greed, envy, or sickness.

A game’s color scheme is very important to set the tone and ambiance of the game. Warm tones--red and orange hues--can be associated with warmth, comfort, but can also represent aggression. Team Fortress 2 utilizes a warm color scheme, while the Portal series uses cooler tones. Cool tones, like blue and grey, are used in science fiction game to depict a cold, uncaring and sanitized environment. 

There are a couple different color schemes that I could see for my character, specifically their clothing. Normally, adventurer clothes have a simplistic palette, with natural hues such as brown, tan, dark green, and black, and occasionally with one or two bright accent colors (blue, yellow, purple etc). I think that would make my character look more like an adventure character. Alternatively, the clothes could be very bright and vibrant, to contrast with the dark and gloomy forest. This palette would features colors like purple, blue, yellow, and orange.