Hello! This segment is going to be about the design process of 1 character for our game A Rat Betwixt. So to start from the beginning I will explain this character, the world it lives in, and the ideas behind it and then tell you where we went from there.
But to understand the Dyrkare you have to understand the world it lives in.
The world of A Rat Betwixt takes place in the fallen Sweden 1000 years into the future. Sweden fell along with the rest of the world in a devasting nuclear war that occoured around 2030. The Swedes, not directly hit by nukes but not safe from the radiation and radical climate changes, fled into caves where a sliver of the population lived on. 1000 years later the world that ones was is forgotten as the survivors children emerge from the caves to ones again take a claim on the now safer world. Societies started to spring up in the ruins of towns, and believes and rumours of the old world started to spread. Among one of these believes is the Order of the Dyrkare, a knights order reminiscent of the old worlds crusaders, that believes in the misinterpreted teaches of Darwinism as the one right truth of the world. They believe that humans comes from fish in a matter of a millenia and that one day all humans are either destined to return from whence they came or that a second generation humans will walk out of the oceans as their superior being.
This is the background story we came up with during some nights of spawning so now it was time to come up with what this character is, and how it looks. One other important design decision effecting this character is that the game is based about secret roles, so we wanted the character to not have a visable face, skin-colour, or even gender.
So we started collecting materials from our world that people could find in 1000 years and misenterpret as armor, clothing, or weapons and what we came up with was a mixture of old diving suits, with a design of templar knights.
This is the inspiration board for the character.
After this I started drawing concepts of the character in the form of turnarounds. The reason why I swayed away from messy lineart drawings was that when trying to turn what you just designed 90° or 45° you really get a better idea of what it should look like and you get a better understanging of the object.
After some weeks of drawing and designing, then redrawing and redesigning it based on feedback we landed on this:
The character has a repeating pattern in the form of circles and downpointing arrows that I feel symbolise drops of water, it’s weapons are a harpoon and the cover of a manhole. On it’s back we have some sort of tank with a hose leading from it to the characters mouth. The armor pieces of this character are designed in such a way that this character has free movement.
Looking back on this design I can see that the sole aspect the design is missing is asymmetry, whereas it is completly mirrored except for the hose and one armguard. It could have done with more, maybe some more tanks or some pouch on the right side of the character to balance out the hose.
After this design me and the co-designer of this character Sebastian Engstrand, whoms blog you can find here https://sebastianengstrands.wordpress.com/, started to decide what materials this characters armor was made of., which in turn decides what colour scheme the character has. We came to a decision by making many different suggestions on it’s colour scheme and picking one.
Now to talk on how it transfered into 3D.
So here it is. It is around 6000 tris and it’s textures are on 2048×2048. We think it transferred well into 3D and that it stayed close to our original idea.
As a reflection on the design process of this character I have the following to say:
What we did well was listening to feedback and iterating it based on it. This character design changed many times before we landed on this one. We also thought a lot about it in a technical way, since we knew it was going to be made in to 3D and that it was going to be animated we made sure the armor pieces was not obstructing its movement.
What was missed was in the design process was some research on materials, what is an old wetsuit made from, is the leather dry and cracked, if not what, copper is soft and probably not the best choice for armor. But some of these can be pinned on the characters lack of knowledge about the old world. But I feel like we could have tried harder setting the materials. Other than that we missed making it assymmetrical, which is something tht went over our heads the entire design period so it is more of a general mistake from us than it is a problem in the design process.
In conclusion this character was developed from scratch and turned out well, it has an amazing story and an interesting design overall. It is very unique! But nothing is perfect and there is some stuff that could have been better, but that is just a lesson to me for next time!
