Character or Asset?

The 2^nd half of BA5 is the same as the first, with a choice to do either character design or asset design, using the previous project as a starting point.

To decide weather to do characters or assets, some questions were explored.

• Which would be easier to make original?
• What would be more preferable?
• Which would be more beneficial to a career in the industry?
• What hasn't been done before?
• Which would be more useful? Which lends itself better to the designed game?

Characters best answer these questions because…

• Characters can easily be explored within the context of the game.
• This would be the first time creating a character would be attempted by myself, it would enable more understanding of the design process, which would help in the game design industry.
• Creating game assets like gadgets and weapons could be attempted after the University course learning about characters from the teaching staff could be more beneficial.
• Characters also include assets to some degree, weapons or items carried, focus however would be placed on the character itself.

The game design document only contains a few images of characters that were designed. There is not much emphasis on characters and there was not much design process, this gives a larger scope to explore and design with relative ease, this is a dream scenario from a game designer aspect, a lot of freedom to explore the design process.

The protagonist character in the game design is

• A rebel (gorilla warfare with the government)
• Male (no reason why cannot be a female)
• Can move between walkways and buildings via a jetpack
• Has weapons to fight the government police (could be anything from a pipe to a sophisticated laser gun)
• Living in poverty like most of the rest of the planet (this would to some degree determine appearance and posture)

With this brief of the character understood, the next stage would be to create 100 silhouettes, as was done in the environment part of the BA5 focus 2 project.