Character Lesson with Justin 13/10

As homework for this week, Justin had asked us to write down the one idea we want to go with for the character project and with the cards Robotics, Disease and Cure/Medicine I came up with:

The game is an RPG where the player plays a robot in a huge world that is a brain (with the environments including memory, emotion, subconscious and body control) and in a small team of two or three robots the player progresses in the story to restore the brain that is infested with tumors (or something like that, could be more metaphorical) and on his way, he has to solve puzzles, meet different factions living locally and become stronger to eventually fight the boss at the end which will save his whole world and end the story. Some factions will help the player in his quest while others are corrupted themselves and try to hinder him and the main quest line has the quest of obtaining a powerful weapon over time with strong abilities so the character's skills and abilities constantly evolve.

Character and World

This week, Justin told us that creating the story rules and then everything else makes the game more authentic in the long run and the design easier, as we don't have to realize 3 weeks before hand in that our design doesn't fit with the story.
Our first task of the day was to draw a character after a random character we received from Justin with the elements of theme, emotions, colours, lines/shapes and movement.
My character was a very happy guy in block colours and strong black lines and the theme I applied to him from my cards was disease so the emotions were sad and hopeless, maybe yucky. The colours I decided on were dimmed, muted but also the colours of infested wounds like dark green, grey and dark purple like boils. The lines would be fluid rather than rigid and straight and the movement would be slow as the disease saps all the energy from the body, limping and bent, maybe pulling one foot after the other, twisted rather than straight. It was very interesting to imagine the character in completely different circumstances and how far you can push his characteristics without losing him completely. (A picture will be added later.)
For the second task, we talked about how the silhouette has to be distinct to that character so that he is easily recognizable, for example if the character has a big weapon the silhouette should be identifiable as a person with a weapon, not a person that has been pierced with a sword because it's hanging over his shoulders in an awkward position that isn't clear to the viewer. Also, if someone has really big hands like wreck it ralph he should be portrayed in a way that doesn't hide the hands in the body but puts them out into space and makes the feature easily distinguishable from other people with smaller hands. I applied this technique to robots (my second card) and drew three easily recognizable robot silhouettes, with their unique abilities on show. (Pictures will be added later.)