Shine Full Bright
A game concept and designs for a game centered around Gimli, a small, candle-headed knight, who fights for his kingdom in a suit of armor that is far too big for him. Made in response to the prompt, "Design a circular character."
Character artist, Concept artist, Animator/Game Art Asset Creator, Writer
--Photoshop, Adobe Animate, Unity--
Animations
For this project, I focused on designing characters, designing environments, creating gameplay mockups and making 5 animated assets including a walk cycle, a run cycle, an idle animation, jump, and an attack animation. This was my first time animating, designing characters, and making a game mockup--- it was a trial and error experience that was very informative for my future projects.
Process
At the start of the project, we were given the prompt "Design a circular character" A circular shape language in characters usually symbolize naivete and friendliness, so I got to work drawing up a moodboard and writing a narrative for the project.
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I was super inspired by the games Rain World and Hollow Knight at the time, and they helped guide my project mockups and style.
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After deciding on a character, we were tasked with creating the 5 character animations. It was my first time animating a character, and I really wanted to create a fluid animation. There was a lot of trial and error, but in the end, I was able to develop my first walk, idle, run, jump, and fight cycles.
During the animation process, I tried to incorporate elements I learned in my 12 principles of animation class. I used smear frames, because I felt that this made my animations feel more natural and smooth. Each cycle took around 11-30 frames to draw. However, after finishing this project, my professor informed me that game animations usually only require 6-8 frames to run smoothly.
After the animations, we began designing a mockup. In my first mockup, I was drawn to heavy religious themes of good against evil, light against shadows, and I tried to creata a surreal creature entity. But after hearing feedback from my peers and professor, I was told that the characters didn't look like they belonged into the world they were in, so I tried to iterate another version which took on a more cartoon look.
In my final mockup, I added additional UI details, foreground elements that added more detail to the stortelling of the world, and a background that had a better sense of depth. I also redesigned the shadow demon to reflect that of a moth, which was more befitting of the theme, since moths tend to be drawn to flames.