The process of designing a video game character

I entered an extra-curricular course in video game design and formed a team with two computer science students and one music student. We built a game around a rough sketch of a character I envisioned and while we built a game as team around a concept of a character, other teams developed the game from around the gimmick they came up with. As my schedule started to clear up, I offered another group my assistance as a designer.

The first thing on the agenda was designing the main character of the game. They used some premade sprites of a coal miner as the playable character for their 2D coal miners themed Bomberman inspired multiplayer game. The sprite was simple but was just a place holder until they could find something better.

Just joining the group, I knew I had to figure out the tone the game was going for to design their desired character. I started by looking at different pictures of coal miners and miners in general to get more information about their different outfits and gear. I drew sketches of different coalminer-like characters and asked them what was the one that appealed the best for them. I tried making them as different as I could while keeping the yellow hard hat and facial hair as the main constant attributes.

Out of the six offered designs the two that were the most appealing were number 4 and number 6. To make them more appealing I created a “high version” of them that’ll better show the design and character those two floating heads had.

Not in too much of a major way, miner number 4 was voted as a choice to lead the game for now. We agreed that in a much later part of the project we will consider the option of character customization by adding some of the liked miners from the original drafts.

Now it was time to give the lil’ guy a body and an outfit to keep him decent. I tried to go with a look that resembled the place holder’s overalls design while keeping in mind that I can always change the color later. I designed a more modern jumpsuit resembling a lot of miners fits that I saw online and lastly did a variety of the first outfit that maybe looked too much like a construction worker.

We went with the second design saying we can change the colors to create color variants for the multiplayer mode.

Now when the character was complete, I made some drawings in different poses of the character, giving him more personality.

In a later phase I created various sprites for essential animations like walking in four directions, losing, winning and just standing ideally.

Looking back I would have really wanted to see those other characters that didn’t make the cut being animated and brought into life in the game but after drawing so many frames of one character I can’t see me doing that again for a while.

Later we decided about taking the game to the next dimension and I was tasked with recreating good old number 4 in 3D. I believe I was able to do a good job taking the smiling miner to his evolved

 3D state all the way from a simple concept.