One of the most difficult parts of this project was also the most important. Designing the player character for this project was a 10 week process of massive design changes, tons of iterations, and many other roadblocks and failings, but I think we’ve finally made something that works for the game and operates well on an aesthetic level. Going into this I was confident I would make something great relatively quickly and boy was I wrong.
The main goals of the character were pretty well laid out. The character should have a robotic hook arm for the swinging mechanic, a cannon pegleg for the melee, and some sort of flowing fabric to emphasize and overlapping action for the player’s crazy frenetic movement. We settled on influences that included sci fi space elements with the antique nautical flair like in Disney’s Treasure Planet. After doing research and gathering copious reference and inspiration photos I was ready to work. I chose to implement the nautical pirate theme by making part of Sherloid’s robotic and cannon leg parts made out of wood and really looked to old firearms as impsirations for both. Another aspect that fed into that was the use of silver, and gold as accents as those scream pirate influence. Another important bit was decided that Sherloid should have a helmet because the game takes place in space. I used a gold helmet glass, and a wooden helmet chassis to continue with this theme. I looked at a wide breadth of concept art and actual nautical garb to figure out a cool looking coat and outfit for the character. After many iterations I came up with a final design that I was happy with.
Coming up with proportions was a huge challenge onto itself. I initially wanted very stylized proportions but I was never able to nail any that didn’t look off. The end result is more realistically proportioned human character. The parts that are still emphasized are the hook arm, leg and helmet. The model went through many iterations and we eventually decided to get rid of the head entirely. I changed the helmet design and also made it fully opaque in order to hide that there was no head for our character. The end result feels a lot more sleek and refined which is essential for our speedy space pirate.
After weeks of work Sherloid is finally at a point at which I can say I’m happy with the design. It was a long arduous process of iteration, tweaks, and fixes and I’ve learned a lot about producing character’s for games as a result. I’ll continue to tweak the model as the game continues to grow and evolve, but at this point the bulk of this chapter has been overcome.