Character Design – Composition and Basic Shapes.
Essentially in the article the main and most important thing
with character design is composition. It starts off with the basics and slowly
progresses through all the different stages of a characters development.
Starting with basic shapes and their meanings you can start
to build an idea of the characters. With circles tending to be the good guys
through to triangles as bad, evil or generally the enemy. This is portrayed
very well through Mario and Wario. With Mario’s overall design being circular
through his body and overall aesthetics. On the other hand Wario is more
triangular in nature, generally all of the enemies in the Mario series have
these appearances.
How a character is portrayed is within more than just
aesthetic appearance. Animation techniques, camera angles and UI is used in a
similar way. Through using basic shapes to connote different effects the player
gets an immediate understanding of the character.
Another way that game developer can create personality to a
game or character is through movement within the game itself. A prime example
of this is Gears Of War which is used in this article to portray the style of
the game. Once again using basic shapes, in this case triangles, they create
the map layout to be sharp with many tight corners to manoeuvre around. On the
other side of the scale they use the example of Journey which has a very smooth
and soft animation and the map itself is very free and gives the player the
ability to roam. With these techniques you can clearly see how they have used
the ideology of basic shaped to connote different emotions and effects within
games.
No comments:
Post a Comment