The main cast for new project.

Okay so I've started my next project.

Started being more aware of stereotypes for both genders.

So hopefully with any 'unpopular' traits for characters in games i can still create some likable character!

If i were to give these characters an environment/ story i would say they go to school where they are judged for not following the 'norm' of there gender.

Sort of the underdogs but it's not like they get physically beaten and bruised, all have divorced or dead parents. I'd like to make it seem more believable then the other the top hero stories.

The main. Tetra.

Gender: Female

Tetra is an energetic girl she also has a fairly big mouth on her.

She prefers to be thought of as 'one of the boys' and just hates displaying any physical feminine features.

Although she is thoughtful, emotional, and kind. Somehow these good traits seem to be linked more to feminine than masculine.

Although she isn't afraid to get dirty and rough house with the other boys, and make really dumb faces.

Although due to her behavior in school she is often called 'Dyke' or 'Gay'.

Most girls don't seem to get along with her.

Boys tend to be okay with her, although they leave her out of any of there sports games of general competitions as they wouldn't want to be beaten by a girl.

The sidekick. Weathercoats

Gender: Male

In contrast with Tetra masculine features, Weathercoats is quite feminine. 

He cares more about how clean his clothes are clean, his hair is kept neat. And he would most likely run away from conflict.

Him and Tetra understand each other and accept each others breach of the 'rules' for there own gender.

In school he is called 'Gay' 'Faggot' as people would assume it from his appearance. 

So majority of his friends are female, although they to assume him to be homosexual. 

The negative attitude from others has caused him to be terribly skittish and nervous to act.

The 'Manly' one. Chris.

Gender: Male

He is closer to the more 'regular' personality for a guy. More masculine.

He is pretty protective over his sister, although his bark is worse than his bite, he has yet to brawl with someone. 

He's fairly closed off emotionally, he only ever confides in his sister Bex reminding her to not tell anyone about the things he tell her, majority of his confiding in bex is for some sort of support of his sexuality, as he is homosexual but feels it would threaten his masculinity if he was 'out' and be treated differently, although out side of school when around people he trusts he is okay to come out to them. 

He is lazy most of his time is spent sat, possibly drinking and smoking with people. Or alone.

He gets along perfectly fine with other boys, and finds is easy to talk to girls, generally sociable though he never gets to 'deep' with other people.

The 'Girly' one. Bex

Gender: Female

The oldest of the 4 'kids' being 18 and in her last year of sixth form.

She is very shy when talking to people in general, she would rather hide behind her laptop which she carries around with her as though it's her child. 

On the internet she is very good at speaking to others, even strangers.

Drinking also helps her speak to others as well. This is her main way for meeting guys. She will often bring guy's home on her late nights out and sleep with them.

This isn't because she has a problem with self esteem or her sexuality. She enjoys it, it's how she wants to live her young life.

Although she has gotten the labels of 'Slut' and people only really know her for that.

Girls don't particular get along with her as she is not good at talking to people to begin with. 

Guys in school try to chat her up and feel entitled to sleep with her because of the rumors from outside school.

The 'Brawler'

Gender: Female

She's been through the name calling and assumptions about her due to her appearance.

She has learnt to love herself and ignore any stigma she may get.

She's basically the 'kids' go to person for whenever they feel stressed or bullied and feel they can't talk to there parents about it, although she usually has an uncaring attitude to the kids due to the thick shell she has had to build to shield from everyone else but she does feel for the kids and there problems.

And also if they need a strong person she is willing to smash!

Also i tried doing them as humans, I prefer them as animals.

A reference for what there skin tones are though.

In one of my uni lectures there was a talk by Candy Guard, an animator. Who animate very simplistic cartoons. She said she feels the simpler the character is the more universal it is. as her character were just outlines, they didn't require colour, so were relate-able to any race.

I found it difficult to put a skin colour on Moo Chris and Bex.

I also have friends who think of Tetra and moo as white girls.

So i feel it's more universal if they aren't human.

Sketches and start of another project.

So while doing Moo i was trying to come up with a reasonably armored female after looking at:

http://womenfighters.tumblr.com/

Made the idea of a moth lady who's armor is made out of sea shells.

Although i wasn't very fond of any of these ideas.

So I went back to doing happy fun time cartoons. These ones designed to be aimed at children.

I personally love sea slugs for their markings, there vibrant colours, and if you can get over the association of them being linked to land slugs they're pretty cute!

Not sure if i would come back to the little slugs but...

I started adding to the characters that would be in the same world as the purple large handed Moo.

And well.

I just got really into this little project.

After a lot of time looking into female gender stereotypes and talking to friends casually about it.

I'm not sure if it was the fact that most of them were male so noticed more faults with there own gender in media. But they also brought up that males are also very poorly portrayed in games.

They to have that 'default' body type, also instead of scantily clad, it's the body builder look. (Although males still have a larger variety if you were to look at a full cast in a game).

You won't find many other body shapes being the lead of a game in western cultures.

We have the 4 'main' kids. I'd say they're about age 15-16.

The lead being the white lemur in the upper left. Tetra.

upper right would be her meek nervous sidekick to be dragged along. Weathercoats.

The bottom 2 i'm not sure on there role quite yet.

Bottom left. Chris. 

Bottom right. Bex. Shy quiet but smart with computers, possibly some kind of research support? 

Moo and gender stereotype questionair

This is Moo

She is a true beauty, and basically a strong melee female character.

With her soulless dead eyes.

Throwing her weight around and smacking people with her big meaty hands in her specialty.

All the poly's go into her face to enable smoother blend shapes and facial animation.

And blend shapes for her eyes, mouth, nose, brows and bottom row of teeth.

There's about 3 times the amount of blend shapes then below.

She still lacks texture 

For her I am going to do a chunky normal map for her and use the channels from that for the texture. 

or the basic guidelines for the texture.

Psychology students questionnaire

A 3rd year student in psychology was looking for games design stunts who were interested in taking a questionnaire about gender stereotypes within games.

So I was obviously up for it considering my whole MA subject. It wasn't a long meeting I had with her in the library but it did open my eyes to both male and females.

She had a 2 mood-board's one of males, and the other of females of characters from different genres.

She simply asked to note anything down and say what we thought of what we saw.

And both side, to me, were pretty bad. Females may have it worse, as being noted as the more 'sexual' gender does have some pretty harsh side effects in reality.

But males are also lumped into some bland repetitive stereotypes combining:

Physical strength, aggression, lack of emotions, and the same body build of huge muscles.

So in spirit of doing more male characters. And involving males as well as females:

Had a go at doing a male lemur, he's unfinished as I've started on another project (also going to involve male characters!)

The Dik dik

A new project i started.

I wanted to make a character based on the stereotype of 'Blonde pink loving high school girl''

Obviously that means make a Dik dik character.

A Dik dik being a type of deer/antelope

A size comparison and what a Dik dik is

So this is what the final design came to be. She's a moody tiny girl in a school full of tall regular antelope.

I've also decided to try and do 2D side-scroller based character.

In a similar animation style to pixles where it's a series of images for each of her body parts.

The aim is to do a short animation of the Dik dik girl (I just call her Blondie) to walk down her school hallways outside. Where someone steals her backpack.

And to show how short she is NPC's will be put in the background of the school hallway.

And here are the environments!! (The things i am not as good at!)

School hallway

Outside school

All together 

Negative female roles

Basically a list of what I’d like to avoid, although this is more how the character is written and used in a plot rather than a design. But i still want to make note of these kinds of characters.

This isn't just the role of girlfriend/mother/daughter/love interest. These are pure negative roles for women and just a character in general.

Smurfette Principle

I think it's pretty obvious how this isn't all too great for women's representation is games, there barley any woman let alone the diversity of women!

This is getting better in games, although in the main cast there's still a lot of smurfettes such as the Mario and Zelda franchises. Which is odd considering half the population is female and there is a growing amount of female characters in games.

Woman in refrigerators

This trope is more of a comic book one concerning super heroes.

When a super heroin is de-powered it's usually in a brutish way. and the female stays dead.

Whereas if a male super heroes dies it's likely they'll come back EVEN STRONGER.

A good example is in batman, a female named Oracle has her back broken and is paralyzed and to spend her life in a wheel chair.

Whereas when batman's back break he's fine! he'll bounce back.

Femme Fatale

Usually the villain, they're the kind of female that knows she's hot and uses it to tempt and confuse the males.

This style of character does give a fairly bad reputation to women, putting out the message that woman are manipulative

Manic pixie dream girl

These kind of females go hand in hand with the brooding male protagonist  these females have only one goal. To make that male OPEN THERE HEART and be happy with themselves and there life. Aww.

The character tend to come with the traits of 'bubbly' 'quirky' oh and let's not forget attractive!

But why is this character type usually a bad type?

Well this sort of females only goal is to make another character (usually male) open up. They are only there to support the male, they tend to have little development themselves or talk about their problems.

An example in a Video game would be Catherine from the game Catherine. A blonde pretty girl who is only there to be peppy and happy and give the male protagonist a good time. (Also the sex appeal of the game)

Image of Catherine here:

Straw feminist

This kind of character is used to very poorly portray what feminism is. They are over the top and the kind of man-hating female character.

A group of straw feminists are often used as rivals or villains.

I'll use a power puff girl episode as an example.

In the beginning of the episode it was explained how gender-neutral and equal there world was.

Then there was a female villain whose outfit was covered in the female symbol sign.

She has some legitimate complaints such as the lack of super heroines. But then manipulated the 3 power puff's into thinking men didn't do any work and just simply used woman.

The 3 power puff's ended up yelling at men and hating them.

Ironically the power puff girls were already quite a good symbol of a strong independent and well-rounded female characters.

It's as though writers think feminism mean a woman think's women have MORE rights than men. Giving a bad reputation of what it actually means. Feminism = EQUAL rights.

Thankfully this has not been abused very much in video games.

The Bechdel test

What is the Bechdel test?
Well it's something I learnt about this week so I'm going to go on about it!


It's a test with 3 rules in it, originally made for films to simply test the presence of woman in the film.

It does NOT test for stereotypes, or the quality of the film.

The 3 rules are:

* There has to be at least 2 women in the film.
* The women must interact
* They must talk about something besides a man, any man.

Now this is just for film, people have suggested it should be changed for games such as:

* Does the game have a playable female character?
* Who isn't fetishized to attract sales
* And isn't meant to be rescued at any point


Those 3 possible rules and explanations can be found here

http://gnovisjournal.org/2012/10/17/do-video-games-need-their-own-bechdel-test/


The rescuing rule had quite a good point for games that the main goal is to save a female and the world.
'' If the threat is that enormous, it’s more likely women and men will join forces to fight it. ''
Then the person went on to praise RGP's such as final fantasy as RPG's usually have a more even number of playable males and females.


Games have yet to be studied against the original Bechdel test but there only appear to be a few games that are mentioned for passing proudly such as Mass effect and Portal.


Although if games need this sort of test, that in itself proves there is something wrong with the amount of female characters in games and there roles.

Going 3D

So I decided to do ahead and do my lovely lemurs and hyena.

Originally i was going to try and do a higher poly 7 - 9K models

But then Bi foun out how low poly Back water gospel was so i decided to follow that route. Although Shove my own style in the whole thick line art way to texture.

So these guy's are about 1000 - 1500 polys.

And EXPRESSIONS Also thanks to backwater gospel with there alpha layered mouths. I liked this idea so much i did it for the eyes and brows as well as the mouth. To me it's the easiest (and funnest) way to go about cartoon expressions.

Unlike the lemur above This one here has a modeled mouth, although still a 'switch off, switch on' styled animation.

Hyena girl follows a more traditional kind, her mouth and ears are moves via joints. It is only her eyes with the off and on switches.

And now on 14th December i upload my first walk cycle!

Available on Youtube here:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPMf4gW553w