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Pirates Love Daisies – The Characters!

Posted by on Dec 22, 2010 in Concept Art | No Comments

As part of the launch celebration of Pirates Love Daisies, we’d like to share some of the concept art for the game.

After the concept was bounced around, gskinner.com decided on the hilarious daisy loving pirates theme. We were sent into our art cave to start bringing it to life, while they worked on the code and the complex gameplay that make pirates such a rewarding game experience.

Here are the character silhouettes, each character went through at least one round of these to massage out the basic shape…and in turn define the character. These silhouettes were talked about and discussed with gskinner.com and from their feedback and direction we headed back into the studio to create the character drafts, the black and white renderings of the chosen silhouette.

silhouettes of captain character

 

Silhouettes Cabin Boy

 

Cannon Guy Silhouettes

Pirate Girl Silhouettes

Inigo Silhouettes

 
The silhouette is an important element when creating an effective character design, weather it be for comic books, video games or animation. With a game of this type it was imperative that the silhouettes be distinctive and unique. Being small sprites on the screen, and many sharing real estate at the same time (and in close proximity) means that we can’t get too complicated, and that each character had to be identifiable immediately. We used simple geometric forms and pushed them, matching the pirates attributes with their physicality, the quick swordsman’s physicality immediately gives you a clue as to how he would act in the game, and likewise the cannon operator takes the attributes of his cannon balls.

We wanted to cover as many different body/character types and to eliminate repetition or similarity in form. Variety is good yes? The answer is yes!

Here is where the characters really started to take shape. Refining the silhouettes we created the rendered greyscale treatments of our pirates. At this stage we took the best elements of the silhouettes that were chosen and tweaked and polished them into what ended up being very close to the final designs.

 

Sword Fighter

Sword Fighter

Captain

Cannon Guy

Pirate Girl

CabinBoy

Lastly, we created scaleable vector versions of the characters that had a colour treatment.

captain and cabinboy final

 

Here is the entire lineup. One of the things we really strived for was a variety of shape and form. No two characters should be confused even at a glance or at a distance.

Pirates Characters

You’ll also notice that they aren’t coloured with what is called “local Colour” meaning they aren’t the colours that you would expect them to be coloured under natural light. We chose a saturated/bright orange hue for the characters. Some early concepts involved different teams of Pirates and we imagined the possibility of several different crews of pirates all in their bright colours, facing off against each other. When the focused narrowed to the “creeps” or sea creatures being the ones stealing the daisies, well we thought that this would help even more to immediately identify your team and push the difference between the pirates and the creeps. The monochromatic palette also allows the characters to be more ethnically ambiguous so that they can be interpreted slightly by the viewer. The dev team at gskinner.com also agreed with the need for sharp contrast between enemies and towers as well as using the monochromatic colour scheme for the players towers.
We’re also fans of 1950’s animation and illustration that utilizes limited palettes.

We hope you enjoyed a little insight into part of the creation of these characters that are close to our heart.

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