Character design
My experience in week six
The source material this week was focused on character design and helping us to understand what is required when creating characters for our applications.
The Introduction Video by Alcwyn Parker gives a brief overview of character design. The video opens to describe the discipline and name a few of the requirements it demands from it’s practitioner, these being a knowledge of everything from human and animal anatomy, psychology, sociology, human emotion and general design principles. The video goes on to suggest that a good character design will be imbued with personality and emotional depth while conforming to a rigid backstory. There is a quote given by Ralf Schneider taken from his book ‘Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction’ that attempts to summarise what the consumer needs to connect with a fictional character:
Understanding literary characters requires our forming some kind of mental representation of them, attributing dispositions and motivations to them, understanding and explaining their actions, forming expectations about what they will do next and why, and, of course, reacting emotionally to them.
The video goes on to give some good examples of character design, and unsurprisingly Pixar Animation Studios and their films Toy Story, Wall E and Inside Out are mentioned. There is a quote taken from the Pixar educational website that reaffirms the importance of imbuing the characters with humanity, and focusing on their humanity in creating the connection with the consumer to which Ralf Schneider is also referring, and a suggestion derived from this that not only must we consider the characters role in our narrative but we must also understand the cultural context of what they are doing.
The Introduction to Character Design video by Roman Dlapa aims to present what is required to get us started with making your own character designs. Dlapa states that there are thousands of character designs made by both professionals and hobbyists yet only a couple of hundred designs really stand out. He goes on to suggest some reasoning for this, some key factors mentioned include: The time, place and message, public exposure, understanding the target audience and consideration of who the character is aimed at and what the consumer needs from the character. Batman is given as an example, and his attraction to the consumer is attributed to him being a cool fighter and it’s suggested that this is portrayed in him fighting the good fight against evil, with a unique approach, such as his advanced technology in gadgets. It is stated that female protagonists are usually stronger embedded in the story and are portrayed as resourceful in the world they inhabit and that female characters are usually avatars of an adventure, where justice and adventure are the strongest motivational points you may find in fictional characters. The video finishes by giving some practical tips to creating a good character from start to finish including: Shape, anatomy, size (of the figure in comparison to everything else), colour (two to five colours per character being recommended), environment and polish. And some suggestions are made of what to avoid, including copycatting what we see from other artists and neglecting to seek feedback on our work.
Tying this to my project
Initially I didn’t anticipate that Escape The App would have a character, but having recognised the importance of embedding a strong narrative to suspend the users disbelief, I now realise the requirement to craft characters that can help to deliver the narrative throughout the differing user journeys. I mentioned exploring the notion of a virtual games master that exists within the app to do this. Having thought more deeply about this and after reading the material this week from Roman Dlapa I’ve began to feel like there should potentially be more than one games master.
Building on my narrative in which Escape The App paints our modern world to be a dystopia created by us being slaves to our devices. Escape is the abandoned movement formed by the government that is now driven by the public. I see the games masters as being the persons who lead this movement and initially I saw these as governmental types, officials such as CIA agents in black suits, but as time has gone on I’ve started to associate more with the thought that The Escape Movement has become more underground and when I think of the games masters I start to envisage revolutionaries somewhere between the non-fictional Che Guevara and futuristic characters similar to the fictional Scavengers from the Bladerunner movie. As Roman Dlapa suggested I need to consider the time, the place and the message as well as who the character is aimed at. Being that my narrative is set in the now and my Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) has been identified as being escape game enthusiasts who are primarily 16-35 year old puzzlers, I thus need to consider what their revolutionary might look like today.
When looking at how this segment of the market behaves, ironically as an age group the 16-30 and 30+ segments are the most highly connected to their devices and statistics taken from this Smart Insights blog post on Mobile Marketing from 2018 show most marketing spend within the entertainment sector to communicate with these groups is currently being directed to digital. Further to this if we look at where a lot of that digital spend is going we can see an increase in social advertising as suggested by this eMarketer post on Social Media Ad Spending. When I think of how to connect on social platforms these days I think of influencers and micro influencers being today’s celebrities that have the most resonant voice. So, when I bring the whole thing together I start to picture quite a hipster, geeky social influencer as being the type of person which encapsulates a modern day revolutionary and thus my games masters. Using this as a basis alongside influences from historical revolutionaries I’ve started to construct the first of my games master characters in this post. And with a better understanding of what my first games master character looks like I’ve revisited the task from week five as I suggested I would in this post and utilised some techniques learned from Phoebe Herring spliced with influences from revolution propaganda art to create polished artworks for the Escape The App screens in this post.
Summary
In this post I’ve briefly summarised the source material from the week on Canvas and I’ve highlighted some of the more important learnings from this content. I’ve gone on to put some of these learnings into practice and started to build up a picture of what the games master characters in Escape The App might look like and I’ve crafted my first female games master character. Finally I’ve taken the finished character and revisiting a task from week five I’ve constructed the polished photo bashed artwork I will use as stills to drive narrative around the escape gameplay within the app.