Task List:
1. find a partner to work on this project with.
2. Read 'Haroun and the sea of stories'
3. write up a 500 word analysis of the book.
4. research and write 250 words on significant, useful and relevant elements about character design.
5. choose one character in the book and draw him/her in 3 different art styles (Graphic Novel/ Manga/ Anime, Minimalism, Pixel Art, Painterly, Realism, Fantasy, Surrealism).
6. 10 minute presentation with partner showing off my work and iteration, and game mechanics (how they are played).
I'm looking forward to the challenge that this project presents, and with the mini group project we did at the beginning of the year I'm fairly confident in my speech skills. The 2D work is really where I will hopefully excel, especially in Manga drawings (due to it being a past-time hobby of mine for the past 9 years).
Things to consider when making characters:
Who are they?
Where did they come from?
How will players engage with them?
How can they be made believable?
Iteration - the use of visual language to represent characters, and create different effects.
Collaboration - teamwork, sharing ideas and information.
Presentation - to the tutors during sessions, and in a final assessed presentation.
The final presentation must include:
1. Evidence of research and characters and story.
2. Iteration of chosen characters.
3. Reflection of your work.
Haroun and the sea of stories analysis
The story is written by Salman Rushdie. It starts with protagonist Haroun Khalifa living a normal life with an amazing storytelling father (Rashid), and mother (Soraya). When his mother leaves them for their neighbour, Rashid falls into a deep state of depression as well as getting shouted at by Haroun, and loses his ability to tell stories. Knowing that this was all his fault, Haroun decides to help his father out by helping him get back his storytelling skills and finding a way to bring his family back together. Along the way Haroun meets many different people and has a crazy adventure to earth’s second invisible moon known as Kahani, and the war between the two Land’s that occupy it (Gup and Chup).The first main theme of the story was the quote: “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” This quote was the main focus of the novel: what happens to a story piece in culture and society when it loses its power. While the book is written for young adults, the theme of story is complicated. Rushdie creates a world in which story gets destroyed, a sign for how the way that narrative is mainly destroyed in a quest for power. Haroun’s journey throughout the story is to answer the question of how important the story is. The final answer is that story gives meaning.
The next quote is said by Iff the water genie, he states: “To give a thing a name, a label, a handle: to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it – well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being.” He is trying to explain to Haroun the power and meaning of the magical and amazing events happening to him. This quote reveals to the reader the power of language used in giving a story its meaning. Throughout the book, Rushdie uses creative language to construct and hide the book’s magical world. By using this language, Rushdie is also creating something that didn’t have a name until now. The power of the story; it is able to bring meaning where there was none.
This next quote in the story is: “This is an affair of the heart”. The primary focus of the book is a love story. It’s a story about the love between a father and a son and between a husband and a wife. Other smaller stories appear throughout the book, such as princess rescue stories, stories about friendship, and heroic adventure stories. But the main overall focus theme is the determination of a son who cares about his father and motivates himself to reuniting his broken family. The end of the book, when Haroun’s mother returns to them, helps confirm this. The happy ending, in as far as there is one, is the recovery of love in a broken situation. The greatest motivation of any narrative or story, Rushdie suggests, is love.
For This week's entry ticket we had to read an online article about character design and write a 250 word essay about it.
Chris Solarski's Primitives article
The article talks about the aesthetics of Games design and Games Art. The author (Chris Solarski) talks about dynamic composition and how we as a player view what happens on the screen and how it’s split into four elements “Character shape, Character animations, Environment shape, and Pathways”. He talks about character design in the article, how characters are designed, played, and looked at, and how they can be separated into three primitive shapes, “a circle, a square and a triangle”. These split how we portray characters throughout games, a circle representing softness, innocence, and youth, a square representing maturity, balance, and stability, and a triangle representing aggression, roughness, and force.
In character design, character shape is important for understanding the feel and overall personality of the character, we use the three shapes to show that. For example the character ‘Kirby’ from Kirby game series is pink and round, his personality is also happy and carefree, this represents the circle shape, whereas ‘Bowser’ from Mario Games has a triangle shape body. Depending on the environment shape with reflect how the animation the character is given by the player, an example of this would be on a 2D platform game when you press a button and the character jumps, compared to a 3D full world where you press a variety of buttons to jump, climb and run. Pathways are used to show where a character is allowed to go and how much freedom they have to explore, AAA games give players the options to explore whole worlds.
In Today's session, we learned about Vladimir Propp's Sphere's of Action and how it can break a story down and piece it back together by categorizing the characters of the story into seven sphere's. These sphere's are:
-Hero
-Helper
-Donor
-Father & Princess
-Dispacther
-False Hero
-Villian
Using these our entry ticket was to choose characters from Haroun and match them with the Sphere's, this is my choice:
Haroun’s Spheres of Action
This is looking at Vladimir Propp’s theory about ‘Spheres of Action’ to break apart the story and put it back together, and decide which characters belong in which sphere. Using this to find examples of Spheres of Action in ‘Haroun and the sea of stories’.
First Up would be Haroun as the hero, while the story does have other types of heroes; it mainly focuses on how he becomes the central hero. He could be linked in with dispatcher because of the fact that he decided to go on this journey himself.
The main ‘princess’ sphere of the story would be Haroun’s mother, as she is what’s been taken from Haroun and what he can’t live without, also saving his father from his broken state could be a ‘father’ sphere of the story. An inanimate example of the princess and father sphere would be that Haroun wants to reunite his broken family.
There are lots of ‘Donors’, ‘Helpers’, and ‘Villains’ throughout the story, as a lot of the people Haroun meets are able to help him progress into becoming the hero of the story. Butt the Hoopoe could be described as a Helper or dispatcher because he helps out Haroun by being his steed to Kahani, He is said to be similar to ‘Mr Butt’ in both manners and speech patterns and therefore is given the same name, when he is introduced he is described as “the bird that leads all other birds through many dangerous places to their ultimate goal”.
These next pieces will be drawing's and illustrations I have done for my presentation
I decided to choose Butt the Hoopoe as the character to work on, while my partner (Connor Smith) chose Mudra the shadow Warrior. The three art styles we chose where Anime/Manga, Painterly and Fantasy art.
The Anime/Manga style artwork is by far my favourite, mainly because I grew up with this style. Best known for it's use of line art dramatic lighting and shadows, along with being able to break the rules of reality through funny gestures/faces. This allows me to create a character without having to worry too much about the consequences, so long as it's not impossible.
Fantasy was my last art style choice because I chose this style because I love the boldness of the style, the way a simple character can be taken and turned into a masterpiece. This was the hardest if the three to do, due to the complication and the time and skill needed to go into these pieces. However I did push myself to create something similar to the research images I had collected.
This first piece I decided to do in Fantasy style, to try and see how I was at handling this art style, I decided to do facial iterations. I wanted to keep the bird shaped face while experimenting with parts such as facial hair and robot armour. I was thinking about keeping his hair long, but for most of them I played around with what his hair might look like short.
My favourite was No.5, but in the end I decided to go with a mixture of No.'s 6 and 9.
These next two are painterly style artwork, I had real difficulty with this style when I first started, but with the help of a couple of third years, I was able to pick up the style quickly enough. The first image is a few iterations on different parts of the body like the legs and wings, while the second is a coloured sketch of his head. Experimenting with different colours and what robot parts would work well with the bird anatomy. During this time I purposed to my partner that we should do inverted forms of the character, for example I work the the bird form, while he works on the robot form, I work on the Yin side, he does the Yang side e.t.c.
This next one was my favourite to draw, I decided for facial iterations. I did this in Anime/Manga style so I could go as wild as I wanted to, I drew more cheesy faces that would be seen when the character is making a scene.
This was my longest and best piece, mainly because I aimed to make it a finalised piece. After I had fiddled around with the iterations for the head and body, I decided to put it all together is a Manga style cover page drawing. Starting with bold lines and reducing it down so it becomes more of a Fantasy style drawing, I changed the overall design a few times because of iteration changes, but mainly kept the features the same due to the 3D project.
The first play board I did was aimed to be a 2D platform game in Painterly style art, in which the player(s) can control Butt or Mudra and help Haroun get through the level to reach the city of Gup. The level's where designed to get harder each time, and the player(s) couldn't succeed without the other's help to complete the level. (once again coming back to the theory of the characters each covering each over's weakness). The Main inspiration where some 2D puzzle games like Child of Light.
The second Play board was aimed as a 3D combat game in Anime style. This time the player gets the chance to use Butt and Madra's second forms as to adapt to the battle situation. For example: Butt's health and speed are higher in his bird form, but his attack is low, however in his robot form his attack is high, while his speed and health are low. This gives the player a chance to balance and juggle which form would be best suited at what time. My main source of research was the new anime combat game Dragon Ball Z Xenoverse.
These last three images are quick sketches on my take of Mudra, once again I will focus on his good side while my partner focuses on his bad side. Most characters had decided to draw Mudra as a dark shady character, I did at first to get a feel for it but then changed my mind. I decided as at the end of the story Mudra should have a more lighter look to him, so I took one of my partner's drawings and changed the saturation to see what Mudra would look like if he had a Yin form.
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