MDDN243

The rat idea was not well received which, mirrors the feeling that I have had for awhile.  It does not seem to be a spiritual enough to represent the ideas that I want to put across.   With the help of Ben, we came to the idea of giving the contrast between the man made world (the road spirit), and the natural world (river spirits).  I want to show that the man made world is part of nature and deserves the same respect and care that rivers get, such as not littering.  This means taking my lizard idea further.  It also means having to design another character to represent the river.  Right now I feel as if the river spirit would be more gecko like and be a lot larger than the road spirit as it is older and more respected among people.

Edit: I decided that the river spirit should be more tuatara like and the road spirit should be more gecko like as the gecko is the younger species just as the road spirit is.

First digital sketch

This is one of my first attempts at drawing in flash so it does not look as good as I think it should.  I will probably redraw it later today.  I don't really like the colour of the fur/grass, I think I will make it spikier and a lighter, browner green.

Character Concepts

I really don't like the litter that used to be all over the roadsides around my old house.  Apart from being bad for the environment it is also unsightly.  So the character I am attempting to design is a sort of spirit for the road side.  The idea came from the movie Spirited Away where the river spirit comes in and is a big blob of mud.  He then gets trashed removed from his body then his true form appears.

With my idea for the roadside I had a look at spirits of Maori culture, namely taniwha which can look like tuatara, and tried to that in my design.  So the first concept was a lizard looking one with grass fur and roadside reflectors as spines.  This could look cool but I felt like lizards don't fit with the roadside feel, so I investigated another animal as a spirit animal, the rat.  

Here are some quick sketches of rat heads I did trying to make it look as friendly as possible and a first drawing.

Next step is to make a design of the rat spirit in the messy state.  I want this to be ugly, disgusting and sickly, this is to show how throwing litter to the road side is not a good thing.

Inspiration

Just some inspiration for my character design for MDDN243.  I really liked the aesthetics of the Gogolithic Mass from Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP.  I also liked how in Spirited Away the river spirit come to the bath house and is a giant mass of mud after the trash is removed from his body it is revealed that he is the river spirit.  The last image is a still from a music video called Bronte, I just really like the aesthetic of the bison.

Jen Zee - Bastion

Jen Zee is the artist at Supergiant games, the independent studio which made the game Bastion for xbox live and later ported to the PC through mostly digital distribution.  Zee hand-painted all of the landscapes in the game which defined the look of the game.

Bastion is game set in the aftermath of the Calamity, an event which fractured the city of Caelondia as well as near by areas of the world into multiple floating pieces and turned the most of the population to ash.  The narrative follows the story of the Kid as he makes his way to the Bastion, a safe place where the people of Cealondia can retreat to in an emergency, and his attempts to repair the Bastion with cores that once powered the city, and discover what actually caused the Calamity.

The entire game is narrated by an old man which the Kid meets once he reaches the Bastion named Rucks, who is apparently the designer of the Bastion and seems to be the only other native of the city who survived, on his journey the Kid finds two more survivors both of Ursa descent who join them at the Bastion.

The gameplay focus on completing levels to upgrade the Bastion and unlock more weapons and perks to make it possible to approach levels in multiple different ways depending on your load-out.  Bastion focuses on combat with both melee and range weapons, and each weapon has history which tells the player about the faction that used the weapon.  

The aesthetic look of the game contains hand painted landscapes and characters which, while not hand painted, look right at home in the lush landscape.

Links

http://supergiantgames.com/

http://jenzeejunk.blogspot.co.nz/

All Photo courtesy of supergiantgames.com