Week 8: Dichotomous Duos

The turret project is now behind me, for now at least, and a new assignment is upon us; the dichotomous duos. We need to design 2 characters from the same world/universe that belong with each other yet are different. My research board on Pinterest shows some good examples. After only a week though I have already hit a bump but I think I'm recovering from it well.

I started the project like any other way, with my notebook. This notebook has become a great way for me to just dump ideas into it as I tried to figure out some interesting combinations. As the randomization of the turret project worked so well for me I decided to throw some of that into this assignment as well by randomizing the theme.

From here I began creating the moodboards for my chosen idea, which was Creation & Destruction with an African theme. I originally planned on having them both set in the future too but I dropped that idea as i felt it was way too much. The final character duo was going to be a child soldier and a larger golem creature, that was like a remnant of a world shaper.

The moodboard expanded as I went through the design process

Next I started the idea generation. We were shown a way to generate ideas for characters by combining primitive shapes but this didn't feel like it was working for me so I decided to doodle some faces and after a few hours I had enough ideas to take them further to begin on the body. I continued until I had a final design for the first of my duo.

Designing the head alone was a mistake

Character 1: African Child Soldier

As I wasn't sure on how to generate ideas for my second character I picked interesting shapes from the moodboards and made another bashkit, just like for the turret. The results of this were overall much stronger than the other characters initial ideas and this was picked up on during our review presentation where our designs were roasted, the majority of us made the mistake of picking an idea then letting that guide our choices which lead to a lot of similar and bland ideas.

The simple silhouettes below were liked a lot more than my fancier final character above; I have now scrapped the war child idea and continued on with just making silhouettes for now. Hopefully this will give me a far more interesting duo in the long run, even if I have been set back a few days.

I think it is fantastic that our designs are being critiqued and we are being very strongly pushed to exit our comfort zones when it comes to our design choices, but there does seem to be a slight separation between some of the things we are being shown/taught and what is actually wanted. The start of the week we were being told that it's great to aim for a style like Dota 2 or Blizzard as it shows you can adapt yet by the end of the week it seemed like the message being said was the opposite. Next week I'll continue where I have left off here, with version 2 of my character duo and if things don't get set back any further I should have one of them modeled.