Mockup Concoction - Character Creation

[Willows]

Lately I find that I suck at making characters. I've been trying to make mockups, and I can do the tiling for the most part, but I fail when it comes time to make a main character that actually has character. Before I get too wordy, I'll show some things.

This is my most recent, and probably most succesful attempt, save for the drabness of it all. Never got around to any displays of any kind, because I couldn't get down a character I liked. The foxlike blob on the right was my attempt, I was trying to run with the same general shape for every character in game, but turns out that that's a bad idea.
(Things I know: Not enough scenery, characters are bland. )


An earlier attempt at tiling that died even sooner, again because I realised I did not have a character to match, nor could I think of one. It's a scratched project with all kinds of exciting errors. Don't bother tellin' me what they are, I probably already know. Maybe.


Seeing as how I failed on the character aspect before, I tried to draw up some concepts FIRST, and work off those. The problem with that is I cannot draw a character with character, for it always turns out being just an animal without any personality behind it. You'll have to ignore the random sketch in the middle, I'm not a fan of wasting my precious sketchbook paper and often draw over previous things. I'm also stubborn and refuse to draw in pencil, for some peculiar reason. I'm all about the sharpies.
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73/SaboteurGreg/Scan20036.jpg

And just for the hell of it, a couple random sketches I've done in the past that COULD sort of be characters maybe somehow. Not really.





Yes. I've been trying for a week or so to make a simple platformer mockup. I'd love help from some of you to help me make one, because I cannot yet do it myself, 'cause I get incredibly frustrated and give up, basically. So do tell, ye mockupers, how do you concoct these lively characters of yours? How do you start your mockups, what do you do first, how much planning have you done before you touch your computer? I'd love to know, 'cause I'd love to improve. Please, oh please, help me.

[ndchristie]

Usually, though i tend to do mostly human character, i begin by sketching one of two things, creating an interesting costume and forming a character who would wear it, or sketching an emotion that i think typifies that character, and then continuing.
here are some costume sketches that became characters.  these are about a year old and i doubt anyone cares anymore if i show them since the project never materialized.  Note how the first girl doesnt even have a face yet.  I reccomend this process for characters that are to be visually appealing, but not for characters you really want to have depth.  a platformer character like the one you are trying to think up i should think would probably benefit from this method because the visual appeal is typically more important than character developement.  Megaman and Mario barely had personalities until the mid-90's.
http://www.geocities.com/donteatbadgers/Girl02.jpg http://www.geocities.com/donteatbadgers/Girl03.jpg http://img486.imageshack.us/img486/1005/jasper01ue1.jpg
this character though was developed by trying to incorporate a feeling of both fright and fascination.  this sketch has enough to it to give the character an entire emotional profile based on just one sketch
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/9573/beastmanheaddx6.jpg
when you find yourself totally in a jam, quick sketches and brainstorming is the best way out.  often doing many things together without any real direction yields the best results.  these can then be refined, or left half-baked as you choose.
http://www.geocities.com/donteatbadgers/SecondaryCharacters.jpg http://img478.imageshack.us/img478/6507/sketchesmainba8.jpg

those methods are the ones i personally choose though and they are in no way tried and true.  the best method lies either in sudden ispiration, or a scribbling down of thoughts and ideas.  its 11:31 now and im going to type what i think as quickly as i can for the next 10 minutes

i need a character.  an animamal bear no mole yes? good ok mole here we go big claws cute face? sorta  like a trinagle im thinking big eyes but maybe thats too cute can i give a mole and edge maybe not ok more narrowed eyes fuck it that seems emo so anyway the claws big claws is that how he attacks maybe or digging i know ill make it a digging game where you have to burrow under and around obstacles but how does he attack maybe he does the typical jumping like mario no thats lame i know he eats dirt and then spits it out no thats lame but i like it so the claws arent for attacking but maybe they are can he jump moles dont really do that but i dont see why not so its a game where you have to dig and throw dirt throw yes good throwing is better and you can claw if you are in a pinch so why is this mole jumping and throwing and sucj i dont know maybe his home was invaded but by what evil beavers have built a dam that flooded his hole and now he has to throw dirt at the evil beavers and break the dams good call and so the world now is flooded and moles cant swim or can they maybe thats a fun alternative gameplay but maybe this is too mario no its not because mario doesnt pick up and throw things except in mb2 where you picked up christ what was it vegetables anyway back to the mole there should be different things he can pick up to do things picking up rocks makes a better projectile sometimes grubs are under the things he picks up because they are all at the surface because thats what they do when a place floods so lets see he eats the grubs for health or maybe for points i dont know and it doesnt matter right now so these beavers beavers are cute nobody wants to kill cute beavers so we need to give tham and EVIL twist i know beavers are like industry well make it about industry and the rise of uninhibited capitalism etc etc because its tried and true lets make them look a little bit like nazis too because everybody hates nazis even the nazis hate nazis so thats settled they are big evil destructive industrial nazi beavers and our little mole is a champion of himself no that cant be right there must be people he is fighting for i know each stage he helps rescue other woodland creatures trapped by the floodwater and thats how you earn points number of little critters saved its all very cute and fun and everybody is happy but the ninja beavers nazi beavers woops oh well they could be ninja beavers in the later levels offer a bit of a challenge ninja nazis is almost as cool as robot pirates in fact lets give the beavers a big robot treecutter machine that kills things oops shit im 2 minutes past ok its 1143 and im stopping

Edit: so thats just a quick brainstorm to try to create a character or group of characters.  i dont know if id ever make a game based on that, but i kinda like the idea and it has some very solid concepts.  writing EVERYTHING down is probably the best way to get an idea out because A - it makes sure you get down most of your ideas and B - you can reread and rewrite.  At this point there is a lot to draw ideas from as far as drawing the character, because you know that the character is a mole out to use what he knows to combat evil while saving smaller, more timid animals than himself.  with that idea in mind its much easier to draw him with a real personality.  If i were you now, thinking of the debate i had with myself early on, i would pick 5 adjectives that would describe a character (example: spunky goofy brave surley impassive) and create 5 quick sketches of the character's face.  spend maybe a minute or two tops on these.  do more than one for each word if you like, then choose the ones you like best and now finally try a sprite

[Willows]

Awesome, thanks adarias. I've taken a couple of the things you suggested into account, got myself some sketches, developed me a character that I quite like, and am about to attempt to pixel it. Once I get the ball rolling, I'll scan some things to show what I've done, just in case there's something missing that I still could be doing. More on the morrow, most likely.

[Indigo]

heh - this one was a ton of fun for me to do.  This is the process i go through when creating a characteristic something-or-other...



here, in the top left, we have a face. - a generic one at that.  Proportions are pretty much correct/generic and nothing is special about this pic.  I then take that picture, and tweak it.  I did three iterations of the face as you can see.

In the one that looks kinda like george bush (the one to the right of the original face) was accomplished simply by exaggerating certain proportions.  In this case, I moved his eyes way close together, lowered the mouth, and raised the nose.  Also gave him a more defined chin.  Notice that all of these proportions are incorrect based on the average human face, but the average human face doesn't have any character! so screw the rules!

the one below and to the right of the original face, aka mr studly, was achieved by raising the eyes, moving the eyes a bit closer together, lengthening the nose (and giving it a defined bridge), and exaggerating the cheek bones.

the one below the original face (or the one that looks like a kid) was done pretty much oppositely of the george bush one.  In this one, I pushed they eyes farther apart, lowered the nose and mouth, and made the ears larger.

I continue this process of exaggeration and refinement over and over, and the end result is a bunch of completely different characters that you can choose from.  This process of course isn't limited only to faces, but anything you draw.  try it - you'll like it!

-Dan

[Willows]

Alright. I'm still stuck on the cave idea, since I found Cave Story on here. Here's my bounce off the same setting.

Willows are a strange, mindless race, attracted to shiny things and things that move. Essentially, one is quite similar to a small child. Excited and full of life, they bounce around and play, free from the dangers of the real world hiding deep underground in their protected home.
One day, one of these Willows happened upon a rather shiny breastplate in his travels. It being shiny, he naturally poked and prodded it with his head, eventually getting it securely wedged on his fat gut. He laughed and laughed at such a shiny posession, and stared down at himself to admire the reflection. Something golden in the reflection caught his eye, and so he looked around for whatever the hell it was. He then saw, rather near to where he had found his shiny breastplate, the tip of a golden object half-buried in the mud. Almost rupturing in bliss, he ran over to it and scooped it out of the ground with his head. He wore it (upside down, though he did not know) without realising that it was a crown, and merely admiring it for the shiny object it was.
Yada yada yada.... someone steals the crown... try get the crown back. Maybe crown is some symbol for power or something by some evil cult. Who knows? Certainly not the Willows.

EAT STORY.


- That is the character so far. He's based loosely off the little excited green things in Cave Story, and strongly off of a character named "Gregory" in a comic book called "I, Gregory".

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y73/SaboteurGreg/Scan20038.jpg
Those are/were my concepts thus far. The words (as Adarias suggested) I thought up were Mindless Curious Afraid Stupid-cute Determined (problem solving) and Crazy.

I'm terrible with colours, and I know they need to be changed, so I'll be working on those. Anything else crit-wise?

[Willows]

Ah, wow! Thanks for that, Indigo! I'm not quite yet into trying to tackle realism quite yet, but that's a bit of useful knowledge that's sure to come in handy.

As a note, my little character is not supposed to have arms, though the plate he found has holes for them.

[Indigo]

I'm not quite yet into trying to tackle realism quite yet, but that's a bit of useful knowledge that's sure to come in handy.

well thats just the thing - this process can be applied into anything.  Cartoony, realistic, faces, vehicles, whatever.  I just so happened to use it on faces.  The process is just exaggeration with follow-through.

the character you've got going is incredibly cute, i must say.  I love him. 

[ndchristie]

i only have one further suggestion : dont use drawing paper, its really ment for soft media like charcoal and well-rendered graphite drawings.  use computer paper.  its cheap, takes pencil and ink pretty well, and scans bright to that you dont get all that gray.  ideal for sketches.  for finished stuff, buy yourself a $10 pad of bristol paper, smooth finish, cold press, and go for a crow-quill or graphic pen instead of sharpie, colored either with good pencils or watercolor.  all of it is well worth it in the long run and it will make all of your work look 200% more professional

[Willows]

Hah, thanks again Adarias. Useful stuff indeed!

The character isn't yet perfect, but I have a fair idea of what it looks like, so I'm moving on to tiles and the like, that I might match them with the character, or the character with them. So far I've failed pretty hard. I'm still battling with colours.
The setting is a cave, and a rather damp one at that, so I started with the brown furthest on the right with mud on the bottom and rocks as the background. I realised that was ugly, so I switched to the dark grey on the left, which is not ugly, though boring instead. The green and blue were just tests to see what they looked like. I kind of like the green, but don't really like the blue.
Later I'll be putting in a roof to the cave, which will be rock to match the background. Any further suggestions are rather welcome.


Oh, and for the fun of it, here is what they look like with the characters included.


What I think I'm going to do is add coloured highlights to the grey one, and use that.

[Willows]

Took the armour out (You'd start out naked) and animated a run.

The basic leg movements:


Yeah, not totally happy with it at all. I think the fact that he either doesn't have knees or doesn't use them throws it off, sooo I'll have to go back and try again. Tiles continue to scare me, I'll get back to them as well, eventually.
Any comments?

[Indigo]

this may help you - written a long time ago while giving C+C to a friend, but it could just as easily help you. Some of you may remember it.

As promised here is some critique for ya...

This will only focus on the main character today - tomorrow (hopefully) i'll get into color theory dealing with your background.

so without further ado....


Well, first things first.  Lets talk anatomy.  Now i know that the style you were going for was cartoony, and thats fine.  But since i dont know how intensionally you did everything, I will show you the hard-core correct way, then you can vary off that path as much as you choose to.  In my version i've fixed the following; the head was too big, legs too stubby, pectorial muscels too saggy, you locked all of your limbs so i gave them a little bend, gave him a prince/knight like posture, and a few other minor things.  I'm sure that you catch on pretty quick, so i'm not going to spend any more time dealing with anatomy.  (PS i was just too lazy to draw that crazy hair due you have on that guy)

Alright - now lets talk artsy.  The first thing i noticed about your sprite is the retona burning amount of saturation...almost %100 saturation i think.  Generally speaking, things aren't ever that high in saturation except for controlled situations.  The basic color theory about game design goes as follows; background = low contrast, low saturation.... sprites = high contrast, high saturation.  I'll talk more about that later, but basically its just to make sure the user can always know the difference between his sprite and everything else cluttered around the screen without losing him constantly.  Now although i say sprites are supposed to have high saturation doesn't mean that it can be retna burning and still be okay.  Just lower the hue to be a bit more grey and you'll be fine.  In my version i raised the contrast, lowered the saturation a tad, and added an outline.

The second thing I noticed was your whomping 42 color count.  Thats just crazy.  I lowered the color count to 12 colors plus transparency.  if you notice, even though i have about a fourth the amount of colors you have- mine looks more detailed and shaded.  If you smart with colors, you can achieve this without too much hassle.  Also it makes replacing colors if you need to not nearly as hard.

the last thing that i did to make your character pop out from the background was add an outline.  if you look closely at the outline, its not a continuous black line.  In some areas where light would be hitting, i used a technique called "selout" or "selective outlining".  Learn about it here and any other pixel term you dont understand: (Selective Outlining)  As you can see - sometimes on different colored backgrounds (like you might find throughout various levels in a game) makes it hard to see the sprite distinctly unless it has an outline.  The outline is optional, and not all games use it, but i think you can benifit from it in your case.

Also notice how before i shaded the sprite, i 'blobbed' things in roughly.  This is how i will be animating the whole sprite.  Its generally not a good idea to animate a fully shaded sprite this complex - so instead, you do all of the frames in a simple manner and then shade each one individually.  this will make your animation look more fluid and non-mechanical.  This leads us to our next section - animation.




here we have alot of useful information.  Basically there are 3 steps in creating animation cycles. in step 1 you create base frames; or in this case - the 4 generic running poses that we all know.  In step 2 you create the 'tween' frames; or all of the ocward stuff the body does while moving from one generic pose to another.  In the last step you shade it.  I didn't complete step 3, but you'll get the idea.

Usually people get overwhelmed on the mechanics of how a run animation works, but in reality you dont need to know much.  Just by laying out the basic building blocks of base frames, all we have to do is look at the base frames before and after a tween in order to create a good seemless motion.  Alot of useful info is typed up in the pic itself, so i'll just let it do the talking.

Here is what my step 1 looked like when i was done with it, along with my step 2. 


Its amazing to note the big difference it makes when you add the tween frames in.  Through the tweens opens the door to adding so much character and even emotion into the animation of your run to help 'define' who the character is.

in closing, here is a final comparison to see how much difference these techniques have made in the overall product.  Might be useful for ya.

One last thing i'd like to say before i go to bed is just a quick thing about what defines a walk vs a run.  In games its much better to have the character always running because it makes the game feel more fast-pased and dramatic.  But what defines a walk vs run.  Certainly a run is NOT a sped up verson of a walk, right?  Heres a quick answer for you; When you walk, there is always at least 1 foot planted on the ground.  When you run, there are moments when both feet aren't even in contact with the ground.  Study the animation i made to see more clearly what i mean.

general info about animating moving things:
the first instinct of an amateur animator is just to copy+paste+move and occationally rotate 90 degrees. And the first instinct of a more advanced amateur is to copy+paste+move and edit a little here and there. This is an alright technique to use, but only under certain conditions. If the part your animating rotates at all (Like the arms do), your better off redrawing it instead of the copy+paste method. But if it moves in a different way, its okay to copy+paste+move+edit+touchup. for example. In the animation i posted above, I completely shaded the torso. I did not redraw the torso for each frame. Instead, i just squished and expanded horrizontally a copy+pasted torso to give the effect that it is twisting on the y axis. Even the base torso to begin with (seen in the first pic i posted) was a copy+pasted verson of the profile view i drew. I just edited it to appear as if it has been seen on the 3/4 view. and the shoulder pad was also just copy+paste+moved (and also flipped horrizontally on the forward stroke of the arm). But as i said - in order to have a flowy animation, all rotating parts should be redrawn each time.

Something that i should have also included in my animation was to have the character leaning into the run a little bit to keep him balanced. Also little things could have been added to even further progress the animation. things such as the shoulder pads could have bobbed up and down in due to his bodies rise and fall.

I have already started on the second half of my little critique session and i hope to have it up by tomorrow.  I hope this was helpful to you in some way shape or form.

-Indigo

[Willows]

Indeed it was helpful, Indigo

I remember readin' that a long time ago. I'm still impressed that you took the time to make that, and I'm still convinced it was time well spent. In any case, I tried to follow the basic guidelines of your lil tutorial there, and realised that I had one frame too many, and that merely editing an existing frame to make the further leg closer and the closer leg further would save me time and probably make it look better.



Not much of an edit at all, but it is an edit, and something was fixed. I unshaded the belly, because I didn't like how it was.

[Willows]

Started making it more like an actual mockup. The one "screenshot" that I want to complete is the one depicting the Willow first seeing the armour or crown. Currently it's the crown, but that is subject to change.

For the GUI, I've got a brain as the healthbar, which will bleed as he suffers damage, kinda like Wolfenstein 3D (Oldschool fps) or Heli-Attack 3. The idea is (much like many bosses in many video games) he can only suffer damage to the head, hence the brain bleeding. The circle that the brain is incased in shall eventually be made look more like a magnifying lens, for comedic value, or somethin'. Also, the place where the portrait is would be for status and oxygen for underwater. He'd look poisoned if he were poisoned, whereas the sprite would only be tinted green (and maybe unhappy), and the water level in the portrait's enclosure would raise the longer you were underwater, eventually getting to mouth level, at which point the character would have increasing looks of panic, and eventually drown completely. Probably what I'd do then is have the water crash into the brain's little circle and engulph it, oooor something.
Oh ambitions, how fun you are.

I'm disovering that there are tooons of things I'm unhappy with, most of which having to do with colours. The bluish-grey metal will be given a completely new palette eventually, and I'm realising that I could do with a few more colours to smooth out my dear main character.
I'll actually redraw everything in the bluish-grey metal. It all looks like crap

Things to add:
A cave roof that isn't just the floor tiles flipped over.
Elaborateness in tiles (up and down slopes, basically. Maybe a pool or puddle of water)
More suited background (Rocks are out, so it no longer fits, really)

Things to fix:
The armour and everything using that same palette.
The main character, and adding some texture or something to the poor shapeless mass.
The Gui, which is terribly WIP atm.

Is there anythin' else? What I could really use is either some guidance in colour or someone smacking me and saying it's not as bad as I think it is. Whatever you say, thanks in advance.

(Note - this is also kinda a study/experiment in portraying emotion through the face. If I carry on with this, that'd be a main focus of the game. No dialogue would come from the character, only facial expressions and movements to "speak" with. With that said, feel free to critique what the character is "saying" as well)

[Willows]

Got back from camping trip.
Upped contrast in places.
Recoloured some things.
Made some slopes, probably broke some tiling laws.



Character now stands out too much, gotta up contrast in other things, too. Maybe.

[.TakaM]

inspiration?

[Willows]

Subconsciously, maybe, 'cause I don't remember seeing that 'till after I started this. It kinda tripped me out when I saw it.

[Willows]

Uhh. Basically added more tiles and moved some things around.

[Evil-Ville]

Make the background darker, it looks a bit confusing that way.

[Rox]

I wouldn't want the background to be any darker, actually. I'd rather see the ground tiles having outlines or something to increase contrast between background and foreground. Making the background darker tends to make things... uglier, from my experience. In fact, you might want to make the background lighter, like in the post-mock-up version. With those values and outlines along the ground/ceiling, I think I'd like it.