For OFT games’ first official project, Willow and I decided to work on a game over the summer. Originally, our we were going to start working on our ‘dream project’ but decided that a narrative-based zombie shooter was a bit ambitious, considering our lack of knowledge of unreal engine.

We decided to return to the drawing board, trying to come up with a project that was simple enough for it to be a learning curve, and allow us to pick up the basics during creation, but also something that we could explore creatively: both mine and Willow’s passion is in concept art, not necessarily programming and development, so we wanted something with a distinct style.

We began to think of ideas for simple two-player co-op platformers, and eventually decided on an idea. There would be two characters, and they would be in two different lanes (one forward, one backward), and would have to work together to solve puzzles, and remove obstacles from the others’ path.

As for aesthetics, we decided to set the game in a forest. We also decided to draw some inspiration from my rejected goblin designs from my ‘Alchemist’s Garden’ project, with the simple look of an indie game protagonist. We knew early on that we would be creating the models ourselves, so we wanted them to be simple as we had limited Blender experience.

For the characters, we had a rough idea of what we wanted from our brainstorming session: The character in the background was going to be larger than the one in the foreground and would be some kind of ‘forest guardian’. The one in the foreground would be regular- sized and would likely be inspired by a Dungeons and Dragons race: specifically, Elf or Tiefling. Willow designed her character first, and I used it- along side the Alchemist’s Garden illustration- as references for the piece.

Originally, I tried to imitate the triangular shape of the hood on the goblin design by giving the character horns wrapped with fabric. This design was just me illustrating the first things that came to mind, but I didn’t really like how it turned out. From here, I took the aspects that I did like – the horns, the yellow eyes, and the flowy dress- and created another design.

I liked this one a lot more than the first, in fact, I thought it really captured the appearance of a woodland guardian, especially the little mushrooms on the wooden horns. From here, I tried many colour variants for this design:

I ended up going with a darker skin tone, as I felt it made the yellow eyes stand out very nicely, and I also ended up opting for the darker hair, as I felt it blended into her horns nicely, and caused the green to be more of an accent colour, like the red. With this design mostly finalised, I created a few more designs using a different illustration:

The first things I changed were making the dress more torn and making the hair more choppy at the bottom to make it appear wet. My idea for this character had shifted slightly, from more of a ‘forest guardian’ to a ‘swamp guardian’. I also made her eyes smaller- if she was going to appear as a kind of mother nature figure, I wanted her to appear more maternal and older- the large eyes made her look more skittish and younger, which wasn’t what I was going for.

I tried a few more experiments using this illustration:

Overall, I still really liked the original, except for the addition of a Lilypad on her head (figure 1.1.10), and I decided to move forward with finalising the design.

With the characters now designed, we began to create a plan for the gameplay, and even thing about possible cutscenes. I drew up this illustration to help myself visualise the ideas:

In this illustration, I started to think about the layout of the play area, and how the characters would be separated. I was also thinking about the possibility of the swamp guardian character begin in a completely flooded lane, as I deliberately designed her head to look like two logs floating in the water- which would be a super cool character introduction.

From this illustration, Willow and I began to think about how the players would help each other, and it was becoming pretty clear that the idea was flawed. We brainstormed and eventually came up with a solution: rather than the players being on different lanes on the z axis, they would be on different lanes on the y axis. One above, and one below. With this new idea, we returned to the drawing board.

With our new idea, I created an illustration to show our ideas:

For our new idea, one player would be in a cave below the surface, and one would be in a forest at ground level. his was particularly interesting, as it gave us the chance to experiment with different environments and colour pallets. We decided to give the above ground an orange colour pallet, and the below a blue colour pallet, to make them opposites on the colour wheel.

We also realised that the characters would probably have to be roughly the same size, in order for them to take up the same amount of space on the screen fairly- so with this, and the new colour pallet, in mind, I returned to the drawing board.

With the forest vs cave setting, we decided that Willow’s blue Tiefling character was already fitting the colour pallet for the ‘Below’ character, so we left him unchanged for the meantime. It also made sense for him to be the cave-dweller, as Tieflings (in the D&D lore) are mostly rejected and feared by townsfolk, explaining why this character is under the floor.

For my character, I mostly experimented with humans or elves, in order to keep the contrast between the characters:

After a few pages, it became pretty apparent that none of these designs were standing out. I wasn’t exactly even sure what I disliked about them all, except that they came across as boring and uninspired. Evaluating the designs, I decided that the first thing I wanted to change was the colour pallet, as I was using pretty washed-out colours, and I hoped this would be a good starting point.

I created a colour pallet with more colours, and with green and yellow as accent colours, as I was previously missing accent colours and contrast from my last designs. I also tried to pick colours that I would easily be able to incorporate into the woodland setting, such as the browns and burgundies.

Another helpful idea was that Willow and I began to brainstorm what the character would do. We decided that she would wield a bow and arrow. This would come in handy for puzzles, such as targets, that we could incorporate into our puzzles; however, I also found it very useful during the design process. Her weapon of choice gave me a small look into this character: was she a hunter? What kind of personality would a hunter have? Etc.

With all these thoughts in mind, I drew this design:

I actually really liked it initially, but the solid eye colour was throwing me off- I didn’t work as well for this hunter-girl as it had for swamp-guardian, so I experimented with some small details:

With the addition of some white to the eyes, and other details, I thought she looked much better. I really liked the colours, and the playfulness of the design, but I didn’t want to stop here, I wanted to further experiment, so I created three similar experiment designs:

I actually really liked all of these designs. My least favourite was the one with the dark hair, but other than that, I could have picked any of them moving forward. I ended up opting for the bottom-right design, and created another page of altered experiments, this time focusing on colour:

Overall, I liked them all; however, I felt that the original top-left design was still my favourite. I liked the contrast of the waistcoat/corset thing compared to the lighter colours of the t shirt and trousers, and the original hair colour was still my favourite. I also liked how green was minimised and only used as an accent colour, just appearing in the eyes and hairband. The only colour I had failed to include from my colour pallet was the lighter burgundy red, so I decided to make her bow and arrow this colour.

With the character design complete, I created a front and back reference of the character, which I knew would come in handy later when I will be creating the model. In this final reference, I made sure to simplify the design slightly, as it was beginning to dawn on me how ittle I knew about blender. Overall, I actually think the simplification helped with this design, as it made it more distinctly a unique style.

With the project in early development, Willow and I are going to focus a lot of our time over the summer into trying to get a working protype. This will include modelling, rigging, and creating animations for our characters, as well as building a working prototype on Unreal Engine. I will upload more progress as I go, to both this project page, and the ‘Learning Blender’ and ‘learning Unreal’ pages.