A Perspective on Perspective
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As this is my first ever blog post I feel like a short honest summary of myself is in order, to give some perspective. I am Harry, 21 years, born and raised on the outskirts of Uppland-Sweden. Introvert, perfectionist, gamer and soon to be artist. There, that’s about as concise as it gets. And now to the main event. As a student in game design and graphics I get to draw a lot, and by a lot I mean A LOT. Ever since I started this program I have been drawing and painting more than I could ever imagine I would when I, in November 2015, decided to drop of engineering science in Uppsala and apply to game design and graphics here in Visby. It was a very nice surprise and I will never regret that choice, because I love to draw. In this course, game design 2-me, another artist, a programmer and a project manager-are creating our very first game. Now 4 weeks into the project I’m starting to realize how much time and effort it actually takes to create a game. Trying to estimate how much time is required to create an asset and then looking at what it actually took only makes it more clear. For example this character, which is the player character for our game, I estimated would take maybe 2 hours to make. I threw in an extra hour for good measures but in the end it took me 4 and a half hours to get to this point which is just a simple sketch really, with some basic coloring.
When designing this character I took a lot of inspiration and help from the concept document. Although in the end I adapted the design to better fit my own liking as well as the style guide for our game. I started out with drawing a sketch on paper which I often find useful when creating new assets because its fast and gives you something to start from. To get the sketch on the computer I simply take a photo of it with my iPad which automatically adds it to OneDrive and syncs it to my PC. Then, its just to open up Photoshop, plug in the Wacom tablet and start working. The perspective of the game we’r making is top-down and so the character has to be seen from above. On the other hand, making a character seen completely from above removes almost all depth of it which makes it flat and boring. Moving the camera angle down behind the character a bit makes it so you can actually see that there is a lantern at the front of the broom and not just a grey box. The biggest change I did to the character that wasn’t in the concept document is the cloak. In the concept she only has a long green dress which made kind of sense aesthetically but when I was trying to draw it it just didn’t. I just couldn’t get it to look like she was wearing a dress in this particular camera perspective. It just didn’t make sense. So I decided to put a cloak on her instead to make her look good instead of “is that suppose to look like a dress?”. Perspective can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, especially when drawing characters but with practice and a bit of patience you will eventually get it right… or just put a cloak on it!  |
