Week 15 - Monday Night Wrestle Nation

OHHHHHHH YEAHHHHH ARE YOU READY CUS WATCHA GONNA DO WHEN THE CHARACTER PROJECT RUNS WILD ON YOU ?!?!?!

It’s begun weeks of preparation and it’s still not enough. The character project has finally dropped and this week has been quite a slow week as I find myself having to slowly ease back into how things work on this course.

Game production this week largely consisted of hand in as well as a getting a taster on using z brush. Looking back I’m so glad that I spent the holiday having a go experimenting with z brush as I know without a doubt with the pace my tutor was going and z brushs’ learning curve I would have struggled and possibly been put off using the program which as of now I really want to be able to get stronger at as I feel it caters to people who are interested in 3d but are somewhat put off by its many technicalities like myself.

In the session we were tasked with modelling a head as well as to play around with the transpose tool which still to this day bothers me because of Z brush’s strange but once you get it user interface/navigation. On the bright side however sculpting heads especially the silhouette of a skull has started to become much more of an easier task but for me to take my z brush skills further it is apparent that I need to look deeper into sculpting faces especially sculpting facial feature techniques. As of now I am currently using my own which is very flawed as these techniques are just based on how I draw but now on a 3d scale which has had some adequate results so far but I know without a doubt that there are stronger and more efficient ways of working for me to discover.

But enough about my Z brush woes, lets get to the main subject of this post; the character project.

This week’s visual studies we finally received the brief for the character project which to my pleasure proved all the murky rumours surrounding the brief to be wrong allowing us free rein on what we want to concept and model and oh boy I had been preparing for this project since year one.

The Brief in short is to design a dichotomous duo of characters one of which we would model.

For this project since before the brief dropped I had always given myself the goal to shine light on a genre or style which doesn’t quite get mainstream recognition in video games to enable me develop something somewhat different and not fall too much into the pitfalls of say typical game sci-fi or fantasy. I would like this project to reflect my desire to work possibly in the more stylised arcade and now indie type of game industry as these were the games and texts I was exposed to when I was younger and are what got me into this lifestyle now.

The ideas that I was mainly playing around with were characters based on these themes/settings.

Tokusatsu

- A japanese term which applies to any live action film or tv show which uses a lot of special effects. I would have been focusing more on areas such as the superhero subcatergory of characters in spandex fighting monsters with martial arts and giant robots

Sword and planet sci-fi

Pro Wrestling

Hip hop High fantasy ( This was one of my various brainfarts never looked into if it was a genre)

-Like this was a quick photobash of what I had thought about. Basically Dungeons and Dragons but about Rap.

Stylised Arcade Basketball - I mean look at this image of Dennis Rodman, He pretty much does the project for me

Some sort of World inspired by the running man, death sport genre and dinsosuars

Basically this thing I photobashed here

However when thinking about which ideas and themes best represented the idea of two contrasting yet similar characters who convey duality it becaem apparent that only two ideas from my list offer a lot in terms of visual storytelling. This included the tokusatsu genre and playing around with possibly concepting a typical hero and monster but due to limitations of the brief citing that both characters must be human and have the base set of human features which apparently means no more or no less then it meant that doing a project around this genre would have its limitations and would'nt the strongest in idea as well.

I felt that contrasting good and evil would be too simple and also doesn’t convey this sense that these are characters that are connected as though they are one of the same but two contrasting parts. This idea then developed into the idea of say a tokusatsu hero and its mech friend which also functions as its power suit or say its limb replacements say if this hero is handicapped. But this idea I still felt didn’t convey a real relationship between two characters. It just felt that there was a character and its tool which could take humanoid shape which now brings me to my chosen idea.

The Wrestler and its Manager

The image above is a prime example of dichotomy in wrestling and something I wish to explore and convey in my project. The contrast between size and build yet the similarities of appearance visually illustrates two different yet similar characters. This is even evident in facial expressions one a much more serious character and the other attempting to convey this sense of seriousness but coming off quite comical, with every difference there is another similarity between the two.

In Professional wrestling a manager is normally a secondary character who has the role of booking their client matches and appearances but also interestingly enough paired to a wrestler who may not be charismatic but can perform well in the ring being the mouth piece for them.

These ideas have inspired me to develop my own duo of characters based on one older larger and more reserved wrestler and its younger tinier yet louder manager.

Moreover wrestling has always featured its eccentric gimmick characters and with this in mind as well as taking an idea a lecture from Alex Brady about representing ideas and cultures that do not game that much lime light I decided to develop the two wrestlers to have an Indian/south Asian background and play around with the idea of merging Indian culture with wrestling flair. Which lead me onto real life wrestler the Great Gama a practioner of the Pehlwani wrestling style and considered one of the greatest wrestlers of all time.

As the Great Gama for a base I have decided to base my duo on the idea of my duo being fans of this wrestler incorporating him as part of their persona believing they are the reincarnates of the wrestler himself.

Further ideas including the duo consisting of a small girl the manager and mouthpiece and a larger burlier but gentle wrestler. Together they make up what they believe is the resurrection of the Great Gama. To avoid any disrespect to the real figure perhaps making the character they look up to be an abstraction or the equivalent of the Great Gama in their world. These are all ideas that I would like to explore and possibly incorporate in the future of the design and backstory of my duo. One of my ideas is to even make it that the larger wrestler is the imaginary friend of the small girl come to life. It sounds silly but in the context of pro wrestling stranger things have happened like a big red demon tearing off the door of a steel cage to confront their undead brother or even a rhinestoned Stormtrooper crashing through a wall.

Anyway I mustn’t let backstory takeover its design we are focusing on so here is what I have produced so far. It’s been a slow week trying to get back to the swing of things admittedly.

Character_Mood

Brawler reference

BodyTpes

Wrestler_Board

indian_clothig

silhouettes

More Silhouettes

Sketches

You may notice that one of my board consist of reference images from Brawler games. This is a result of the first exercise we received in Visual studies which was a character matrix. This matrix included ideas such as backstory to help inform our decisions of design as well as what type of game we are choosing to design our character for. I have chosen to design for a sort of arcade brawler type of a game hence my silhouettes featuring very large endomorphic body types to convey a very strong and study character. Moreover from researching brawler character art these characters tend to have exaggerated proportions particularly in the limbs to emphasise the power of the strikes these character throw in animations. To balance the look of power and but gentleness in my wrestler will be a challenge which I am excited to see develop as this project continues.

Anyway this has been the start of the character project I just hope all this prepartion will come in handy.