Category: Character Design

Here are some examples of character design that I admire and use as inspiration for player and enemy designs.

The pixel art in Owlboy is amazing in general, but I like how expressive the characters are and how distinct the characters are. The unique details of each of the main characters also reflects their function, in addition to making them easy to identify. I’d like to make a character that can reflect that much personality, even when adapted for pixel art.

In general, I love the character designs in Studio Trigger shows/movies. Their characters are bold and dynamic, with unique easy-to-identify silhouettes. In a majority of their animations, they prioritize motion, and I feel like that goes a long way to informing the character designs. These are traits I’d like to emulate.

Kill Six Billion Demons is a fantasy web comic I really enjoy that excels at lore and worldbuilding. The designs for the human and non-human characters are unique and detailed. Not detailed in a “realistic” since, but rather they have a intricacies and details that reflect their origins, story, lore, etc.. I’d like to set a game in a world that rich, with character designs that build out that world.

So anyway, my character is a fast food worker who got hit by a dump truck on the way home from work, sent to hell for some reason, and teams up with a bored Devil to break into heaven.

Also, she has a gun.

Like a reverse 2D Doom, perhaps.

Hopefully those inspirations I mentioned will eventually manifest as I work on the game… ?

The character design for my character was based on the style of my favorite two video game characters; Mario and Kirby.

This is my main character, Max. He is a boy who lives for adventure and the outdoors, no matter how many monsters he runs into, he never stops having fun. These are three different three variations of him.

The first game character I had inspiration from was from Kid Cobra. He’s a fighting character from the game called ARMS. The parts I like about him is his purple color scheme, but also the unique design on his mask that covers his face. This will soon inspire my characters color scheme.

The second inspiration I took from was from Splatoon’s Inklings and Octolings. While thinking of a concept for my character, I thought , “Why not make them art related?”. So this inspired the bit of concept for my character, but also the customization of clothing, in this case the mask, is also utilized in my design.

Lastly, the character I took inspiration from was Nagito Komaeda from Danganronpa. No, not his personality, but the kind of coat design he has interested me the most. I also have experience drawing in the Danganronpa art style, so initially, when creating my character, I had this style in mind.

Finally, here is my character designs for my game!. This is Robin, a spray painter, he roams around the city vandalizing walls in alleyways and on abandoned buildings to express his thoughts and feelings to the public. For some variations I only changed his color scheme. From left to right, The left design was his original color scheme that is posted below, though his design was simplified more than the original design I made, the middle design is a color scheme on how I tried to use Nagito’s color palette with my own twist, and the right color scheme is a color scheme based off of my 3 favorite colors.

As a fun fact about Robin, based on his design, he’s mostly poor, having patches and stitches on his coat to show that.

Here is Robin’s Main design that I had to simplify for this project. It was premade a while back and I wanted to use it for something. (Personally, I prefer this design better, but it would be hard to make this into a pixel sprite.)

Part 1: Inspiration

First is Angela from Lobotomy Corporation. Her design is very pretty, I particularly love the cross-hair detail in her eyes, which stays until she is free from her mission as an AI.

Second is Peacock from Skullgirls. She’s meant to be the “cartoon character” archtype, having her empty eye sockets stylized to look like 1940s cartoon eyes. I also like the literal bear trap she has for teeth, and the eyes on her arms.

Third is Tomerry from Library of Ruina. Tomerry is a fusion monster of the couple, Tommy and Merry, and the grotesque form brings the player their first impact at how messed up the game’s world really is. Coupled with the in-game sounds, they make for a great first boss.

Fourth is Max from the Sam and Max franchise. He’s a cute lagomorph creature with sharp teeth and a craving for violence. Also sarcastic, I greatly enjoy everything about him.

Fifth and finally is Hat Kid from A Hat in Time. She’s a cute alien child in a top hat and cape, wielding an umbrella as a weapon. I really love her base color palette, the colors blend well and is easy on the eyes.

Part 2: Character Sketches

For my character design, I wanted to make a snowman girl using my favorite color palette of white, blue, yellow, and orange. The main over-all thought in creating these variations was that each one should be relatively easy to animate should they become the final choice, meaning no extremely fine details.

There were three constants between every variation, being:
1. I want her hair to be white and short.
2. I want her to have a big floppy sweater with pom-poms mimicking the snowman buttons.
3. I want her to wear boots.

Every other difference shown was pretty much just me sketching it out, thinking, “Well, what could possibly look good here?” both in terms of clothing style and color placement. I knew the sweater should also be mostly white because well, snowman. But what about the accenting dark blue? Each variation, I played around with where it could be, same with the legging colors. I also played around with different skirts and no skirt at all, as well as boot length and style.

In the end if I had to choose, I’d say I would go with the middle variation, but with taking the bottom sweater trim and fur boot tops of the right variation.