Sprinting Into Pre-Alpha

At the moment we are creating games based on the concepts we did a couple of months ago. My group is creating a "defend the objective" type game where the player is tasked with defending his/her truck from waves of bandits. The most off the cuff mechanic in this game is that you are only allowed to move in a circular arc around your truck. To make sure we are going to complete the game before the course is finished we are working by using scrum, a framework designed to constantly update and iterate what you are producing. In scrum you work in sprints. Each sprint is a set amount of time in which you set out to complete goals you made at the start of the sprint.

I took on the role as lead artist again and these first couple of sprints I've mainly focused on creating the main playable character. I had a lot of freedom when designing her as we hadn't come up with any specific details that she had to have. The only directions I got was "anything is fine as long as it isn't revealing". Although there were still some contextual guidelines. Her clothes, for example, should be easy to move in and not that delicate since she is a traveler, they should however be a fairly good condition as she is a tailor.

Another challenge designing her is that in the game you are supposed to have three different levels, represented by different clothes. This means that I have to design three different outfits for her which makes things a little more complicated.

Above I've attached a couple of different concepts I sketched. To make the process of designing them faster I made a base human which I then used as a mannequin that I was able to just draw different clothes on. The one furthest to the left is the first one I did. It is a bit of a mess because I just drew whatever came to mind, but it has a lot of elements which carried over to the rest of the designs. The one in the middle is probably the sixth or something I made. I'm quite pleased with it as it shows a lot of intricacy, with different patterns and details. However it is a bit to much for a level one outfit, and as that was the one that the most important at the moment I didn't end up going with it. The last one is the final concept of her level one outfit. It isn't flashy, which is what I want, and I think it fits someone who travels about.

There are still some problems that needs to sorted out however. The biggest is that because the game is top down you aren't going to able to see any details that are not on the head or on top of the shoulders and arms, but I'll be able to overcome it.