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Indie Game Character Development
The one thing I have discovered in my solo quest for indie game development, is that it requires almost every known skill to complete. Design, illustration, coding, music engineering, layout, modeling, creative writing and the list goes on. It is one of the most difficult and rewarding thing I have ever done. I am not in the technical since a coder. I am actually a designer, artist and illustrator. Like many of you who hope to bring your indie project to market, I had to stumble through this process. I ran into some great resources (here) that did help with this. Also some really bad waste of precious time.
Character Sketching
The starting process ca be the most difficult and for this I started with the character design. I start with what’s called brain storm sketches…..A lot of them….. I mean a really lot of them. Brain storm sketches really have no direct objective other than pulling ideas out of your head and to flesh out characters. As artist we should be consistently practicing sketching and human anatomy, this I can not stress enough. It seems when ever I take long hiatuses I’m needed to sketch a ton more just to get back in the groove. To help with this I now draw everywhere and on anything. Im like the red hot sauce commercial now I mean I really put that shit on everything.
Translate character sketches to game character
Once you see a good idea run with it. Now it’s time to draw that character in several different poses. If this will be a 2D character some of these poses can be used for the key poses in the games animation. But you will need a lot of different poses. Don’t worry, these will not go to waste. I have use the ones I like in ads, cover art and in game content. If this will be 3D character you will have a lot more work to cover. You still need to do a ton of poses but you will need a few to help with the modeling. Blender is a great tool for indie developers looking to start on a budget. Blender is totally free and I would argue close to industry software like Maya. I also have a resource for 3D character design that is absolutely awesome and inspiring, you will have to check out (here).
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The current project is very heavy on character development. I started with basic sketches for character concepts.
I transported the sketch into a vector based app like illustrator or Vectornator on the iPad for portable work.
Vectornator is great by the way. The entire design was created in Vectornator with the exception of the background which I was easily able to export into Illustrator for the final touch ups.
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