Character Designs

-Lizzie Seymour

We all agreed to have a look at designing some characters, to mash them all into one in the session on Wednesday, so I started with a mood board:

As you can see, I did use it as a bit of an excuse to geek-out. I may not know many games, but I’ve seen a lot of Sci-fi movies, and in this I’ve managed to sneak in back to the future, dr who, and a bit of blade runner.

I then started sketching out my own design for the character based on this. He needs someway of identifying that he is the same guy across all the time zones, which will probably just be an item of clothing or colour that he always wears. He also needs some sort of flying machine, for which I have come up with two ideas, either a machine for each time, or a seagull side-kick (this is plymouth after all) which helps him fly.

Ok, so here are my very roughly sketched character designs:

I used the professor layton characters as a basis which you can probably see, but I imagine them to look more like the back to the future game characters once they are modelled in 3D. My past character is a young boy, dressed in typical pilgrim clothes, my present guy is just wearing jeans and converse, but with hard-hat and safety jacket as he will be running round a building site. I know my old man for the future looks like santa in some sort of creepy onesie, but he’s actually wearing a space-type suit, like the tiny guy in orange on my mood board.

I also did really rough sketches of their flying machines:

The guy in the past would have the same contraption from my mood board, I know it’s a couple of hundred years too late for the pilgrims but I thought it was too funny to leave out.
The present guy has a jet pack type thing, and the old man in the future has a flying bike, because he’s old and needs his comfort 🙂

Finally, I sketched out how I imagined the seagull side kick would work:

In the past he carries the boy as he’s only small, in the present he is ridden, and in the future people can fly anyway (in this case a jet powered zimmer frame, couldn’t resist!) so he just flies along beside.

I don’t know what the others will think of the seagull idea yet, but I thought the game needed more narrative than just a man flying into signs which move him to the past and future, and a time-travelling seagull could provide that. Maybe you have to travel through time to collect his eggs from bad guys or something.