Heroes and charactrer design.

Few days ago i stumble uppon the news that my friends from Gameloft are putting up a character design contest.
It was all about designing a videogame hero. Now.. anyway you look at this, the challenge is good enough and the subject quite... debateable.
Willing to put my skills and creativity to the test - i quickly came up with a fake name and roughed up some sketches. As the last Disney hero said: A fake identity is everything a man has :)


This was my first hero - a take on the styled New Yorker.
I figured that the costume, the outfit is mostly what visualy the characters stand for these days - and i haven't seen many "suits" clothing the heroes. I also wanted to apporach this in a graphical style to match.
That same day however i wanted to push the ideea of the costume/character and decided to expand my hero's world with "function suit based characters".
The hero moved to london and shifter to a 2D paltformer - this is what he's up against :)


Since i know that the jury will also look for some good rendering skill in the contestant - i threw in the generic character - bad ass girl - and spiced the sketches with variations in outfits - for fantasy and urban.. etc.
Tell me if you've seen this before :)

here's a close up on the portrait and some stages of the making of.


And that was it.
I wrapped those images up and sent them as Mr. Evil Zeal (for those who played HAWX2 for Wii - YES.. i was advertising :) :) )
However, either my skills and creativity are not strong enough or they did not came out of the images i sent... or maybe it's just my failing mood... the bottom line... i didn't pass the pre-selection.
Not much trouble thought. can't stop the flow :) Since i sent those .. my mind started to wonder and think trough the problematic of an authentic game character.

There are mainly 3 categories - the bad ass (pictured below), the cute character (mario, ratchet, etc) and the japanese hero/antihero (and that is a mix - slightly more feminine features, can turn into comic/cute if needed ..etc - think all the Final Fantasy crowd, Dante, etc)

However, originality is a bitch.


separated at birth as the guy who did the selection said - it's kinda clear that the rest of the unicity comes from the costume and non visual traits (abilities, voice, attitude, setting.. well.. CHARACTER :) )
for the cute one i thought the ones from above classify - however... i wanted to explore... the explorer - since i find it a good .. recipient.
skip this :)


also... talking about costume and japanese/asian typology - i tried a small test - starting from the latest Givenchy couture collection - that to me seems very MMO able :) i wanted to sketch the male part.

go check the colection up if yo uhaven't - it's amazing.
So... here we are.. the explorer - i quickly arrived to this: north american mountain dude - i could already picture the rest of his tools, pickhammer, snowpads, small metallig whiskey bottle, backpack and all.
Also his enemies and the monsters are easy to imagine.

Yet i wanted to throw in a bit more character - so i shifted him to the gipsy side - that allows for more color, bigger moustache :) and a hell of a better speach :)

I had to rush those up since i have a ton of other things to do.
But before i wrap this up.. i'm tossing in some other sketches just to clean the closed.
First sketch of the hero and my new red haircut -

random

Life drawing at NightDrawes Sessions @ Lente