Designing Jones

Very early on I had a pretty good idea of Jones’s appearance. A jung man with short curly hair and a tiny nose. Even in the initial sketch there’s quiete a similarity with Jones as we know him now. I created a model sheet width four different head designs. The team was happy with the designs and we ultimately chose the first head on the top left.

Everything went by pretty smoothly. But as always it wasn’t as easy as it first seemed.

Body Structure

One of the biggest questions was how Jones’s body was going to look. Would he be a tiny child with short arms and legs? Or maybe a Teenager going through puberty? A grown man not accepting his midlife-crisis? It could even be a cat-human who is completely confused with the drug problems of our society.

At this point it was crucial to choose factors for making the right decision.

Target Group

The age of our main target group is 16 plus. So a child would not be in the target group which none the less doesn’t exclude Jones being a child but there are more reasons.

Believability

A child being confronted with drugs on the street does not quite fit the range of believability we’re going for. The same goes for a cat-human. What a shame.

Context

There also was the possibility of Jones being an adult. There is no problem with believability there and it also fits our target group. The only thing I found was that the most critical phase of falling for drugs is in your teens. Alkohol and cigarettes are legal now, parties are a thing, you feel pressured by your schoolmates and friends and you’ll get confronted with drugs in one way or another. In that sense an adult wouldn’t fit the context as well as a teenager because he has already gone through all of this.

So you’ve probably guessed it by now, we decided on him being a teenager.

This is just concept art though. In-game he will appear in a different artstyle and completely in profile view. The head and body type won’t change a lot from now but there’s still clothing, colours and maybe even animation to come.

So stay tuned!