I want to show you what I have been up to with the characters. I hired a professional to do the art for the game's store page and promotional material. I want to make this game's marketing look as professional and to be as awesome as the game is. I hired the artist Eric Hibbeler who does a lot of work with other games you might of heard of like Crashlands and Hive Jump. I like his character designs and think they match perfectly with what I am trying to do.
I want to show you the process of how we game developers go from a rough idea to a finished piece of art....
Commissioning art might seem like being a fancy patron like the Medici. Like I now have to wear a monocle or something. But you just have to stay humble and just work through it with the artist. Collaborating with an artist to make something that exists only in your mind is like trying to get a police sketch artist to draw someone that you only met in a hazy dream from two nights ago. It is convoluted and arbitrary.
I start by sending the artist proximity characters in existing media. In this case I wanted the lead character to be a strong confident captain that is just a little crazy. Think captain Ahab and Aguirre from Wrath of God paired with a really strong woman like Ripley from the Alien films.
Based on these inputs, the arrest gave me this sketch:
Good outline. Good clothes. But she was too...soft. Too young. It looked like her first day on the job. He took the feedback and went in for a new sketch...
This was the right look. Bold. Confident. A bit intimidating. Exactly who the character is. Eric then cleaned up her facial expressions, added color and created a high resolution version of the character. Now we have the final version of Nadia Stormhammer. Captain, explorer of hidden religious antiquities, bad ass main character.
Talk to you in a week.
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