Character Design - Brother

Initial character silhouettes.  I preferred the silhouettes with larger eyes and heads as the character has to instantly convey their emotion to the player which will be more difficult to achieve with realistic proportions. However I don't want to risk pushing these proportions too far as I could risk the designs becoming unappealing (as seen in the character design in my previous concept art post.)  I want the brother character to come across as fairly young and innocent which is also easier to achieve by using the wide innocent eyes of this design.

Some variations of the final designs.  I personally like the variant on the left best as he still looks young enough to be quite cute and innocent however the glasses make him appear old enough to be adventurous and go off exploring (and thus get in to all kinds of supernatural trouble his sister has to save him from.)

Concept Art

These are a few pieces of concept art I've done for the project so far.

I started this one a lot earlier in the year and tried to establish the overall mood of the game.  I was quite stuck on how to approach the character design proportion-wise.  I didn't want to aim for realism as I feel that's a bit pointless in 2D games which have so much potential for stylistic art.  The eyes are definitely too large and exaggerated here though.  I've also really noodled in to the textures of the character and completely overdone it.  I think next time I'm painting skin etc and my blending starts becoming muddy I'll just start over that section again.

Lighting the scene was also difficult.  There was potential for a lot of really dramatic, contrasting lighting and I feel I've rendered everything too dull.

I've also added too much detail to the trees in the distance and failed to portray the atmospheric perspective strongly enough.

For the ground I experimented with using the polygonal lasso tool which I think came out quite well - the sharp edges created using this technique contrast nicely with my rough, gritty brush strokes.

In this one I was trying to explore how the exterior of the school would look. It had to appear ominous, old and be relatively small in size.

I also really struggled with the lighting on this one.  The lighting is far too light and subdued for the night time scene I originally intended.

There's also something a bit off about the level of blur on the fence compared to the tree on the foreground.  I feel the scene would look a lot more believable if I made the fence slightly more blurred to match.

The rendering of the stones on the building also looks very rushed and I should have taken more care and found better reference.

The building itself also appears quite flat.  Drawing the building at a different angle instead of front-facing may have helped.

However I feel the trees in the background turned out nicely, as did the jagged slabs (created using the polygonal lasso tool again) of the pathway.

In this scene I was experimenting with the scale that could be used in game.  I also tried to be more adventurous with lighting.  In the scene I wanted to use lighting to direct the player to potential hiding spots (in this case the lockers) via a potential hole in the roof letting moon light through or an old flickering light on the ceiling.

I was also trying to think of interesting colour combinations and thought the sickly green and rusty red might be interesting however it just kind of makes me think of Christmas colours.  Perhaps a more bluish turquoise colour might have been better instead of the green.

The texture of the floor is also unclear - It's not obvious whether it's wood or carpet etc and looks too similar to the dirty wallpaper.  The stone pillars are also rendered quite strangely - the lines are a bit too clean compared to the rest of the scene.

The blurred foreground assets enclose the scene and feel a bit claustrophobic - however that might actually be a positive in terms of horror game design.

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To sum up, for future pieces I need to:
- Start over as soon as my blending becomes muddy.
- Do more lighting studies, specifically of night time scenes.
- Experiment more with character proportions.
- Experiment more with colour palettes.
- Do some material studies.

Overlay Tests

Animated overlay tests I created in Gamemaker to test the effects of an old film overlay. flickering vignette and particle effects on the atmosphere of a scene.  The film overlay is still a bit rough and the flickering of the vignette is too fast.  I think it would also be interesting to play with overlays that obscure the players vision more too.  More tests needed.

Environment Thumbnails

Various thumbnails depicting ideas for in-game environments.

Monster Design Development

I felt the design was too cliche and grudge-like and the dress was too boring and could do with some subtle detail.  Despite the purposefully mangled anatomy of the feet the monster's left foot on the left drawing looks especially off and could do with more shadowed areas to highlight the form better.  However I feel the regular life drawing I've been doing is really starting to show - arms, knees, legs and even hands are starting to improve and I think I'm progressing in portraying 3D form.

I also got some really useful feedback from my peers on this design:
- Play with the anatomy more, add more limbs.
- Too cliche, the design is too much like the grudge.  Changing the hair style will help and will also add to the silhouette.
- Raise the elbows of the character to skew the anatomy more.
- Eyes look to friendly, remove the pupil, tone down the white or make them completely black
- Skirt sticking up on the right hand side is confusing and unnecessary.
- Toes could drag along the floor as she floats.

After this I did some thumb-nailing to help with the iteration.  I decided some creepy ancient markings on the dress would be suitably creepy and add a bit more visual interest.  I'm still unsure about adding more limbs as I wanted to keep the design quite human-like however I compromised by experimenting with having a little ghostly arm slowly emerging from the monster's back.  I also thought adding triangular shards of glass sticking out of the body would add to the silhouette whilst making the monster appear more threatening.  

After experimenting with different mask ideas I decided not to stray too far from the original design as I was quite set on something fairly plain and incorporating a sinister smile (very Five Nights At Freddy's influenced).  I settled on a sort of combination of 4 and 5.  Peer feedback on these designs was also extremely varied.  For instance a lot of people though 1 and 10 were the most frightening however others felt they were too cliche.

And here's the final design!

Perspective Tests

In order to help me decide what perspective my game should use, I decided to create rough and quick animatics of gameplay using famous horror film scenes as inspiration.  

First-Person test:  Taking inspiration from the mechanics of Year Walk, a 2D first-person horror adventure game, the player can move forwards and turn around 180 degrees at certain points in the environment.  

Angled Third-Person:  An attempt to re-create cinematic camera angles found in survival horror games such as Resident Evil.  In this scenario the player would use the D key to progress, regardless of angle.

Third-Person:  The most popular perspective used in 2D horror games, the player would use the standard WASD and Space Bar keys to progress.

Conclusion:

I've ruled out angled third-person as it would be a very tedious and time-consuming to utilise - Multiple character animations would have to be created depending on the angle and though the variety of camera angles could be interesting, I found from previous experience this can make controls frustrating to use and thus this perspective will be too risky to implement.

First-person in 2D is very interesting as it is rarely done however may make chase sequences awkward in game.  My next steps for this project will involve further perspective tests and a prototype demonstrating both first- and third-perspective will be created.