The journey

After being told we were to give a small presentation about our journey through MA and what we plan to do for the final semester, I went on to try and think how i ended up here and say it in an understandable way.

So...

I had initially started looking into female characters in games.
The first thing that was pointed out while comparing males with there female counterparts was that female characters are more often sexualized.

Which in turn made me instantly want to design and model characters with no possible sexualization.


At first i was going to make higher poly characters, around 10K after being interested in 'Borderlands' style.

But seeing the low poly count and sharp shapes in black water gospel, with there amazing textures using a heavy amount of black lines, I lowered the poly count, using mostly alpha's for the detail such as mouths, hair and eyes.




And because I rigged 3 character that i felt would be easy to animate due to there low poly count.
I had my first go at a walk cycle.

I realized i was not a big fan of manual animation.



I then looked further into the more negative traits seen in media, knowing what sort of things to avoid. Things like only having 1 female character in a group of main characters.
Female roles that are used mostly to drive a male character, such as killing the female off or most there dialog revolving around trying to make a male cheer up and become a better person.

And at this point i was doing the essay, my subject, ’Are sexualized women needed to make a mature game popular?'
And with that essay I came to the conclusion of no, female characters do not make a game popular and nor to males.
Game play is what sells a game, visuals in general will also differentiate a game, however characters with personality will make the game more memorable, quotable and overall more enjoyable.

So it became more important to me to design women with more diverse personality traits and looks to them.

And at this point I had noticed it wasn't just female characters who were being poorly written and under developed.
Male characters also tend to just be lumped into a singular trope, they may still get majority of the attention in games so statistically more likely to have more well written and diverse, but a lot of them seem to have the same stereotypes.


This lead me to want to create men and women who weren't the typical game character personality, I wanted them to emote and have feelings, not revolving around revenge or strength.
I wanted males who could share feelings without being considered not a 'real man' and having females who didn't want to show skin or show emotions or have a typical game girl body and be considered not a 'real woman'

Feelings don't make a character weak, they simply make them human, relate-able, and far more interesting.

After the second essay the animator Candy Guard was most useful, she said that anthropomorphic characters let you make content about gender roles without making it to obvious.
She also mentioned personality being more important than the design, as her animations were very simplistic, but you wanted to see the characters interact with each other anyway because they were written well.


So i ended up having 5 characters who wouldn't fit into the stereotypical role usually found in games.



I had my adventurous tomboy who likes to be considered one of the guys.






A feminine male who has a love for fashion and is incredibly skittish when it comes to conflict.






Another male character who had the general masculine features, aggressive and closed off emotionally, he was also gay and felt it threatened his image if it got out.





A 2nd female character who was shy but fairly open about her sexuality and permiscuois but was shamed for doing so.






And finally a 3rd female who looks very masculine and cave man like, a cold and uncaring woman because she's been treated like some sort of freak show because of the way she looks.





Originally i was going to make a game idea with these characters, but a lecturer in drama was asking for 3D models for his students to work with using motion capture data as they wanted to try a new form of acting education.
As games are using the mo-cap technology more and more it will be useful for students to learn how to act in motion capture studio's.

It's also a completely new way to act for students as they may have to try and move as thought they are the cartoon characters shape, bigger hands, shorter legs etc.

This opened up a new way to showcase a story using my characters interacting with each other. Filming the students faces while doing these animations so i can add details
to the characters faces on top of the gestures made with there body.

So for this to work, I had to learn the program motion builder, as you had to set up a special rig in this program so the skeleton knows which bone is a thigh, an arm etc. So it can move with the drama student.

Now i have 2 of my 4 characters ready to be used with the drama students. I just have to come up with some form of narrative that I'm happy with, for them to act with and be directed.

I will try to come up with a story that involves a lot of body language and gestures which also shows characters that are likable and fun, yet branch out from the stereotypes. So both me and the drama class get something out of it.


So for my final 3rd semester I'll be creating and animating a story, I'm going to have to create the 3D environments which will depend on what the story's going to be. I have up to 5 possible characters to use