Character Design Project - Killer Instinct
For this project I have looked into character design for an existing game. The game that I looked at was Midway Games' Killer Instinct. To decide on a design, I looked at existing characters in the franchise, notably Cinder and Chief Thunder, who I researched their backgrounds and how they came to be. It was from this that I was able to create a backstory and a design for my character.
The original sketches for my character - Angelica
The design of the character once redrawn in Photoshop. I'm still very pleased with how her boots turned out.
For my character, I took a lot of inspiration from scythes in other games and in animation as well as mythology. I feel that she would fit into the game's universe as she is designed to be slightly comical and still serious enough to work alongside existing characters of the franchise. I designed her to be a fast, rushdown style character as this is a common class of character in fighting games and also gave her abilities unique to Killer Instinct such as an instinct ability and a passive ability. I also tried to keep the colour scheme darker so to fit the colour palette of the game which I feel I did relatively well.
Once I had designed my character, I had to redesign her as a Lego character. This meant reworking parts of her design to be more suitable for a different audience. Most notably, the mask she wears is not suitable for the younger audience that Lego targets.
An image of the Lego redesign of my character
As is apparent in the above image, I toned the mask down to be more suitable for Lego's audience. I feel that I have done this well as comparing the original design I did to the new one, it isn't so aggressive or dismal.
After I had designed my character in the Lego style using Adobe Illustrator, I modelled her in 3DS Max and rigged her for animation. Overall, I was not too happy with how the model turned out as there were rips in parts of the model and I took too long to model certain parts of the character's weapon which meant that some parts of the model were left unfinished.
Another part of this project was to draft a small moveset for my character which I sketched storyboards for. Once I had story-boarded her moveset, I used a camera and a green-screen to record each of the moves that I created a storyboard for. Once I had done this, I trimmed the clips so only the shot I was happiest with was left; I did this using Adobe Premiere. After I had each of the clips, I used Adobe After Effects to cut the green background from each clip and left only myself in frame. Once I had these clips, I also had to record audio to go alongside the video. Seeing as this was difficult to do myself, I drafted a voice actor from amongst my peers to voice my character. I feel that this was the most logical decision and the student that acted for me did a very good job of portraying the sarcasm and seriousness in my character.
