Struggling Dev does Character Design

Motivation

I'm currently playing around with a game (engine). I like that it has so many different things to play around with. Rendering, physics, ..., art.

Since this is my first post I kinda feel obligated to write a short intro. I intend to keep my posts somewhat concise, I'm not an experienced writer. But my current idea is to show my thought processes and my "struggles". Therefore the posts might get more verbose than I want them to be. Also, they may not contain a solution to the problem I'm currently tackling - at least not in the first version.

So much for the general intro. Now what is this first post about? I'm currently playing around with a game or engine. I'm not sure if a final product/game is actually on the horizon, I just enjoy writing some code, thinking about interesting challenges and do the odd piece of "art"work. Variation is the name of the game.

I recently stumbled upon some art theory stuff, Hue Value Saturation and character design, which made me wonder how my game "art" stacks up. "Maybe", I can figure out how to improve in this department.

So, let's see how my developer art fares.

Silhouette

The silhouette of a character should be recognizable. That means if you remove all detail from your character and just paint it in one solid color, you should still be able to recognise the character. So how does (never thought about naming the player character, until now that is)'s silhouette hold up?

It's you! Whatever you're supposed to be. I'm not sure what to do with this. It looks like a somewhat distinct stick. This might be good enough, considering how few pixels the character is made up from.

But his legs feel a bit long in the silhouette version. Maybe some booty fixes this "issue"?

It looks 🤔 better? How the heck does his backpack stay where it is, it has no straps. But im diverging...

UPDATE, paint the silhouette with colors to make it something completely different. Twitter @strugglingdv, hashtag #jergen

Value

But, let's add back the color. I've always struggled with color. If I, in a rare case, drew something with pencil I actually liked, I never dared to add color in because I usually f***** it up. With colors it's important that they form a harmonic unit and go well together. Another thing that's important is where our eyes are drawn to, e.g. what pops out. There are different color systems like RGB, CYMK, HSV, ... HSV seems to be the one the digital art guys prefer
¹.

• Hue is what us layman would call the color itself, so yellow, blue, green and so on.
• Saturation is the intensity of that color (hue)
• Value defines how light or dark the color is.

The following image shows how a change in saturation or value changes a hue/color. A lower saturation makes a color lighter, while a lower value makes a color appear darker.

Every hue has a different inherent darkness. Comparing darkness levels across colors is hard because the hue throws us off. But, we can kind of normalize our color and remove the hue from the equation. This way we can visualize what parts of an image pop out.

Visualizing the Values

In GIMP: add a new layer and choose "HSV Saturation" as its mode. Then fill it with black and make sure the layer is the top most.

• the dark mustard of the hoodie and the dark blue shadow color of the pants seem to have the same value.
• the light mustard color, and the lighter pants blue are also of about the same value.

What to do with this information? The different parts of the character itself seem distinct enough. When looking at the value version there are four to five main parts: pants & hoodie, shoes, hair, backpack and maybe the face. The hair, backpack and shoes really jump out and draw focus.

• The pants and the hoodie are distinct enough when colored.
• Whether the backpack is too prominent, or not might depend on its utility in the game. It doesn't seem too overpowering in the colored version though.
• Im a little inclined to do something about the face. For one, the contrast is probably too low. Faces are important to humans - so I have heard. For another it seems to have a green hue, which I haven't noticed until now.

Summary

Although I still have mostly no clue what I'm doing, the little theory helped. It made me take a closer look at my character and although the actions I took weren't always a direct response to what I wanted to improve (looking at you silhouette booty), overall it helped make my "art" better.

Thanks for reading, and keep on struggling.

References

• Steam: Dota 2 Workshop - Character Art Guide - Silhouette
• Game Developer: How to Reduce Visual Confusion in Your Game

Addendum

Meet Jergen

I've decided to name the player character Jergen - at least for now. The pronunciation is as follows:

• The J is pronounced like the Y in year
• the e is pronounced like the E in v*e*ry
• the r is pronounced with a rolled R
• the g is pronounced like the G in great
• the e is again pronounced like the E in v*e*ry
• the n is pronounced as usual

1. Absolutely no source for this 😉 ↩