Hello, Detective!
Pre-ramble
Ahoy hoy! It’s been a couple of weeks so I figured I’d write a new post to remind everyone to remain excited about Voodoo Detective. If this is your first time here, welcome! Please, feel free to check out my last post where I take you on a tour of the Chic Shell Hotel and discuss our background design process.
In this post I’ll be sharing what I know of the mystic art of character design.
Character Design?
Well you may ask yourself, what the heck is character design? (And you may ask yourself, where is that large automobile?) Character design, as the name implies, is the process of developing the design, the style, and the personality of a character. The work of a character designer will often manifest as a series of model sheets (some of which I’ll share below) that render a character in many different poses with consistent proportions.
While these model sheets are not used as assets directly in the game, they are terrifically useful to the folks doing our animation (I’ll talk about animation in another post). The animators can take these “accurately” proportioned models, in all their various poses, and use them as a guide to help keep animation consistent.
If character designers are responsible for giving birth to a character’s design, the animators are responsible for raising that design, seeing that it takes its first steps gracefully, and teaching it right from wrong. Later on, when no one’s looking, I steal these beautiful children and force them to walk around, talk to strangers, pick up items, and use those items to solve puzzles.
Case Study!
Well now that you know what a character designer is, I’d like to walk you through a quick case study to show you how our designs evolve behind the scenes. Before that, I’d like to give a big shout out to our team of character designers.
The Crew
Tiana Oreglia - Tiana is our lead character designer and the second person to join our team. She’s an unspeakably talented artist with unimpeachable taste. She’s been a great boon to the project even beyond her role designing our characters. She’s also a lovely person. 12/10, A+.
Nathan Andersen - Nathan is another extremely talented artist working on our character designs. He joined the project a little later in the “game” and has taken to our retro aesthetic like a duck to water. I feel like a broken record signing hagiographies on repeat, but these wonderful artist/people give me no other choice!
Nick Freeman - Nick just joined us and is helping us keep our animation folk busy with fresh character designs to animate. While we haven’t worked together long, I can already tell we’re lucky to have found him. He’s a thoroughly pleasant individual, talented, and a pleasure to work with. He’s been designing some of the exciting residents of the Chic Shell Hotel.
Alright, that’s enough shouting. Let’s get back to that case study!
The Prompt
As with our backgrounds, so too with our character designs, we begin with a written prompt containing a description of our character’s personality as well as any references we may have. And when I say we, I mean me and Eric Ackerman, my co-writer, close friend, and partner for most creative decisions made for the project.
This particular prompt, for our main character, was over three pages long with many references and details. I’ll spare you the majority of that, and share only the first paragraph.
Voodoo Detective is a hard-boiled, wise-cracking, rough-edged Voodoo private investigator who employs Voodoo to aid in his investigations. He is incisive, fearless, contemplative, and cynical, but beneath his tough exterior, he’s got a conscience and a soul. He’s often sarcastic, but he doesn’t transcend sentiment.
Voodoo Detective lives alone (probably in his office), but his brother Donut Hole Billy lives on Zo Wanga and owns a bar called Donut Hole Billy’s. The only other family we specify is Voodoo Detective’s grandmother whom he calls Grammy. We don’t go into it, but she was a legendary Voodoo doctor, famous around the island area.
References and Description
- Exactly 6ft tall :)
- Black/African Heritag
- Mid-thirties
- Trenchcoat and Fedora
In that three page screed, we gave Tiana many different references to draw from, but I think this was the seed we started with. We also had examples of Houngan Attire, Voodoo artwork, stylized interpretations of Lwa, Dr. John may have come up once or twice, references for various articles of clothing we were contemplating at the time, etc.
First Pass
Pretty awesome right? I told you Tiana was cool!
While we didn’t think any of these designs were exactly what we wanted for Voodoo Detective, we liked the fellow with the multi-colored vest so much that he became another character in the game named Ricky Tinsel, the friendly bartender at Donut Hole Billy’s.
Just like with our backgrounds, we often have one or more rounds of feedback to try to hone in on exactly the style/personality we’re looking for. In this case, there were two things we wanted to work on. First, we wanted to give Voodoo Detective more Voodoo flourishes to help distinguish him from an ordinary detective. Second, we wanted his face to reflect that he’s a little beaten down and jaded. He’s seen some hard winters. He’s known heartbreak. He’s tough, cynical, and scrappy. Detective Bogart was a little more gentle than the man we had envisioned.
I also personally think every character should have some salient feature that sticks in your mind after even a single glance. A little je ne sais quoi to make a regular character transcend to become an iconic character. So we provided more references and Tiana began her good work on a second attempt.
Second Pass
As you can see, we’re getting closer! Going back to the three bits of feedback above, the detective now has a flower in his label as well as a feather and some teeth in his hat. We’re starting to flirt with the Voodoo theme a bit, but it’s not ready to come home with us and start a family. So, we came up with a few more ideas on how to further express his Voodoo side. We thought perhaps adding a skull to his tie at the collar might help and also suggested we add bones to his outfit somewhere.
Eric and I both loved the faces Tiana had come up with for the two gentlemen labeled as #1 on the left hand side of the image. Tiana had the brilliant idea to add Woody Strode to our list of references. Voodoo Detective now had the more cynical, tough look we were hoping for. Which is not to say Woody Strode was a cynical man (maybe he was, who knows).
So Tiana, ever patient with our endless feedback cycles, moved on to her third pass.
Third Pass
Here Tiana was focused on adding in more Voodoo influence to Voodoo Detective’s design. We all loved the skull tie so that was definitely staying, but we weren’t as excited about the bones in his lapel. We also thought:
His hat should be flattened and the feather removed
His trench coat’s collar should be modified to look more like Humphrey Bogart’s outfit in Casablanca.
He needed to have a few more Voodoo inspired touches (an eye, as in private “eye”, for his belt buckle, some rings on his fingers, etc.).
Also, I still believed we were missing some stand-out detail to help cement Voodoo Detective in our minds as an icon rather than just another detective. We decided that giving him some face paint or a tattoo would help him stand out in a crowd.
So Tiana went off again to work on her fourth version of Voodoo Detective.
Fourth Pass
Alright, Tiana!!! This is our guy! The belt buckle worked out great, the hat looks much better, the jewelry is very cool, and the face paint is iconic!
We only had three small notes for feedback this time:
The Damballa symbol on his coat felt superfluous.
His belt buckle could use some color.
We liked a combination of the face paint / tattoo (Is it paint? Is it a tattoo? We’ll never tell.) from version 2 and version 3.
Fifth Pass
It was at this point that everyone in the office stood up and applauded. We’re super happy with how Voodoo Detective turned out and intensely grateful to Tiana for her hard work and patience making him come to life.
Enough
I’ll stop here for today. Hopefully you’ve come away enriched with new insight into the character design process, but if not, I sincerely apologize and promise to quadruple my efforts to be amusing and informative going forward. I hope you all have a peaceful, healthy weekend and I hope to see you all again soon! Thanks so much for reading!
Love,
Eric Fulton