Character Design

After having a quick talk with my tutor about how the project was going so far, and areas to look into when developing the game. He reccomended me to look into the character in which you play a little more before continuing, as from doing this it will help me into developing the game environment as I can design certain elements on the game level to suit the character, for example if his special attribute is jumping, then I can design the game level to focus on the challenge of jumping from ledge to ledge, or for example the Donkey Kong games, one of his attributes is he is able to swing from trees to trees, so the game designers have included vines to swing from to add both extra depth to the game and challengers.

I have not looked into characters that much so far for this project, as it was my idea for the next brief, in which to design the characters for the environment. However an idea I have is, because i am thinking of the bigger franchise picture, in which to design a whole game out of it which features many different game environments from the ice caps to Space. I'm thinking of a simple design, with very basic shapes. However I want the character to have a different attire for each level, so obviously for my level im designing at the moment I want the character to have Mayan influenced attire, also I like the idea of the character having a weapon to suite the attire in each gaming environment, for example a Spear from my mayan environment and a Ice Pick for the Ice/snow environment or something along those lines.

Heres a few Characters I have been looking at, I thought of Mr Potato (below), because firstly I think it would work well with the idea I have, and the way you could change is attire and appearance for example having different physical attributes such as eyes,mouth,ear and hair which you are able to do on the toy anyway. It also could be customized to come up with different character designs,and also fit in with the environment level, other aspects which could be customized is the clothing and weaponry. What I have found with allot of new games is that they seem to allow the players allot of freedom into come up with there own designs, for example the new WWE 12 video game is allowing players to create there own arenas, and games like Little Big Planet which ill mention in more detail in another blog post allow to to come up with your own characters and design game environments which can be then uploaded onto the internet for other players to be able to play, so potentially there is a market out there and is a great idea I believe in which to develop further.

Another range of research I thought of was the characters in Little Big Planet, I don't want to go into to much detail, as like I said I plan on writing a blog about this brilliant game, but I really like the way in which you are able to customize the character in the game, from a whole variety of different outfits, and not just a few you could come up with many different character designs on the game. I also like the aesthetic look of the character as there kind of like voodoo dolls, something which would actually link well to my Mayan game environment actually.Once again its just a simple design, however I believe the ability to customize your character is what adds huge amounts of depth.

I also thought of these 2 classic flash internet characters, weebil and bob, I just think something so simple as a character designed to egg, could actually work and could be nice animated to roll around the environment and jump, gave it a bit of attire and yeah, i am not looking into complex characters, im looking into simple humerus designs.