Day 11 of Game Design- Characters and Premise of the Card Game

In our last discussion, we set up the following things as primary objectives:

1) Make the stories of the characters interesting and easy to read.

2) Build a mood board based on the direction we would like to take.

3) Get the sketches of the characters ready.

So, for stories, we went back and added more details to them to give them depth. We followed the structure of communicating the motivation and current situation of the character in our last effort. This time we added details in their background story.

The for the character designs, we had to keep the background story in mind. We also had to make sure the characters didn’t seem like they are generic in their depiction. However, we needed to have a clear idea of our visual look. So, as we were looking around for a direction, we found a game known as “The World Ends with You”. It was a game released for Nintendo Ds in 2007. One of the great things about this game was its character designs. They were bold, stylish, and were unlike any other designs one might see in videogames.

So, we made a mood board based on the characters of the game. The roots of this design can be seen in a typical manga style but the designer has taken steps to make the designs his own. Sharp strokes and dark thick lines can be seen in all the characters, which I believe made this design unique.

So with this approach, we started designing our characters.

Various iterations were made with characters to depict the things that we wanted. In some characters, the face was a bit off and in some, the hair didn’t look great. Each character also had a story to tell and we wanted to share a part of that through the design. The color schemes had to be thought through and in some cases, it might have been dictated by our personal preference. So, with all these thoughts we arrived at our final character designs.

We also worked on a draft of a poster for our premise.

This is a work in progress but the main objective is to depict the central character of our premise: Startups and Bangalore.

We also looked at some ideas about how to present our character’s background story and character art. The following were some ideas from pinterest.

With all the things that we had done so far, our next objective would be to take them further. The other task that we have for next class is to depict one character’s journey of choices through a flowchart.