Joey – game ready mobile game character

Hi, let me introduce you to Joey

Profession and characteristics: Joey is a young boy (15-17) with roots in the former Inuit-Tribes of the past. He loves to snowboard and play with new tech-gadgets.

Character Development

At the beginning of the project, there was no clear idea of how the first character of the game should look like or what his trademarks are. Therefore I walked my customer through the process, to find what he wanted the first character to look like. After an initial talk, where I asked general questions about the age, gender and the look of the character, I started to imagine what he was looking for.

With that in mind, I set up a mood board on Pinterest where I collect different characters and looks, from games and characters he liked and stuff I thought gonna fit well with his wishes.

To put the selected images better into an order I opened a Trello board with a selected range of example characters, that could fit his wishes and please the target audience.
In Trello we could discuss specific aspects of the different designs like proportions, silhouettes and trademarks and things like how far in the future the character should be and how this
should be represented.

Concept-Drawings

The production of the game is set into an agile process, which we embedded into the design process, too. With that, we just made short sprits of work so we could evaluate the results more quickly and adapt soon.

As a result, I created just a small amount of concept drawings in Photoshop to see if it goes into the right direction. The customer had to choose of this enlarged thumbnail drawings and give some feedback about the direction.

After one design was considered for further iterations, I created some bigger drawings with his feedback in mind, that leads me to this results

With a mix of different elements of the bigger designs, the customer was satisfied with the look. With that, I could go on and draw the front and side view.

From 2D to 3D

After the look and the different views were set, I took the image planes of the front and side view as a ground base of the low-poly 3D modeling in Maya.

After some iterations over the 3D model, the next step was to make the UV Layout, so the character could be textured. As agreed upon with the customer I created several color different color schemes, that I finalize later in a combination of Photoshop and Substance Painter.

The next step was to set up the Human IK-Rig of Maya and make the weight painting for the whole character. With the provided Control-Rrig I was then able to animate the character.