18. The characters design
This step was really important and crucial for our video game as the player would have to interact a lot with the characters, especially with the main character Wido. Due to the game design work that we achieved so far we had a pretty good idea of Wido’s personality. We needed to reflect each aspects of his personality through a digital illustration. Overall we needed to create a character with a strong charism. Wido was not the only character we had to design, but he was for sure the most important. This is why we decided to start with him. The most difficult was for us to define a design style. Once we had the one for Wido, we knew it would be easier for the other ones.
We started by drawing sketches of Wido’s face to find the right expression as well as the right face shapes. Wido is a teenager so the player needed to see it right away. These shapes had to reflect a determined boy, as well as someone the player could trust. As our video game was in 2D, we focused on the profile face of Wido. To not have a render which was too flat we added it a small perspective to it.
Step by step we sketched the full body of Wido. It was really hard to find a dynamic posture for him. He needed to be ready for action and at the same time waiting for it.
We wanted Wido’s silhouette to be the same as a regular teenager. For the style of it we chose to use only simple geometrical shapes and add small cool details related to Norse mythology to bring a viking spirit to the character. We explored different kind of equipments which made sense for Wido to wear.
The choice to only use simple shapes, not too detailed, was first to have a unique and stylish illustration style related to the Norse mythology spirit, and secondly to be able to easily animate every body parts of the characters.
One of the biggest challenge for Wido was to create a dynamic posture, we wanted him to look determined and ready to save the world. We did several different one before to create the one we were happy with. We also added more perspective to the silhouette which looked too flat in the latest explorations.
At the same time we were playing around with equipments details of Wido as well as his clothes. The tricky thing was too not go to detailed as at the end Wido will not look big on the TV screen while the player will control him.
Colors were really important to highlight Wido on the screen, we needed to find brighter colors that the ones used for the set design. Find the good color combination took us time. We wanted to use desaturated colors related to nature. We also thought to add textures on photoshop to bring more details to the clothes. But due to technical constraints, we couldn’t do it, it would have been too heavy and would have caused lagging. Instead, we played with shadows using different tones of the same colors.
The next main character was Elfi, the magical protectrice of Wido. This character was probably the most challenging one to design for our video game. First of all, Elfi is essentially made of magic, so we had to define if she should look like a human, an animal, a creature, or something more abstract. Secondly, she needed to look benevolent and powerful.
With that in mind we first explored a human version of Elfi. We wanted to create a strong physical link between Elfi and Wido, as if there was the same living being. Also, a really important thing we had to design was Elfi’s transformations via the magical runes. For our prototype, we had one to design : the strength (rune Ur).
Then, we explored another road where Elfi was more abstract, like a little magical creature. We played a lot with opacity, particles, gradients and the color blue to bring the magical touch we needed. We also thought it could be cool for Wido to be wrapped by the magical aura on some of his body parts, like the arms.
At this point we thought Elfi became too important compared to Wido, the player needed to focus on Wido and not that much on Elfi. With the current design explorations that we had we felt Elfi looked too human. So we decided to go with a totally different approach where Elfi will be represented as an abstract magical aura. We ended up with this stylish magical flame which looked alive and not human. That was it, Elfi character design was borned!
An other important character of our prototype was of course Fenrir, the mythical wolf. We studied some different existent wolf illustrations before to start to have a good understanding of a wolf anatomy. We had already our character design style thanks to Wido and Elfi, we now needed to fit it for Fenrir. As Fenrir was the boss of our video game prototype, we definitely wanted him as scary and epic as possible. To achieve that we played with his scale (much bigger than a real wolf) and we accentuated his jaw.
Fenrir was definitely the most complex character to design due to his unique and abundant fur.
Tyr also had his important role in our prototype. First of all he was the only god present in the myth of Fenrir, and secondly he was the one who was rescuing and giving Wido a mission. Finally, he is the one who bend Fenrir to Yggdrasil for eternity. There are not a lot of Tyr representations in Norse mythology archives but we had a pretty clear idea of how we wanted him to look like. Tyr is the god of Justice and War, so he needed to be sculpt for fight with a strong charismatic aura. We wanted him imposing and friendly. To show the player he was not a human but a god, we made him a bit taller than a human.
We tried different colors adjustments to have something related to what we had for Wido.
Through his progression, Wido will have to defeat Nordhal’s minions. We wanted them to look like little creatures easy to defeat but at the same time massive and maleficent.
As said before, because of performances restrictions and animations constraints, we couldn’t go crazy on textures and lighting. But we decided to go further to promote the video game. Below are all the final characters with lighting effects (these are not the in-game characters).
End of post 18 — Next post : 19. The characters animations
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