Meet Stephen 1.0
|
This is Stephen. He is the main character of the game SelFish, which is a game about this little fish who gets picked on by the other fishes in the aquarium where they all reside. Eventually he’s had enough, snaps and tries to kill everyone.
As one of the graphic designers in the Team Unicorn, I designed and drew Stephen. What I wanted to convey in the design was the feeling of Stephen as the underdog, slowly traversing the boundaries of sanity and loosing his mind to become a full fledged killer. I already had an idea of what he would look like, considering I had already spent the previous week/sprint on character concepts. It was a natural choice to go for a small body, and overall small Stephen. He is after all the harassed underdog. Big eyes that will be used for displaying different facial expressions was also a concious choice. And I also gave him an ominous smirk. When it came to production, I divided my work into different categories; I chose one of my concept sketches and cleaned it up a bit, then started to work on the line art. This step is most time consuming and tedious task… until you find yourself having fun with it! Getting the hang of line weight and how to produce relatively straight lines is crucial to achieving the look you want for your line art. The general look we (the dev.team) wanted for our game was a cartoony and humoristic version, pretty close to the original concept. So therefore I decided to make the line art as clean and sharp as possible (generating hours upon hours of work in Photoshop). I used a hard edged brush and varied the size where needed to get the right line weight. I chose to build the lines and then erase away the excess to try and achieve a nice look. Next up was the local colors. Here I wanted a color that makes Stephen stand out from the background. The player should always be able to spot where they are on the screen, so after talking about color choice with the team I went with yellow. This contrasts well with the blueish underwater background color in our game. When it came to the lighting I wanted to make it simple, mirroring the look and feeling of the game. I shaded with a darker yellow color and used a soft edged eraser to blur the edges of the shadow. Same process with the key light (light source from above). Last but not least, an honorable mention to; Photoshop, which has been working against me troughout the whole process! Freezing up, refusing to cooperate and almost crashing on me. Pro tip when this happens: 1. Patience and 2. Save your project often.  |
