Hey everyone! It's been a while since I've posted here! We've got plenty of new updates that I want to stagger over the next few days, just so that it isn't one giant update
Today's post is going to be about the creation process of Freja, our main character. This is being posted on behalf of Tay, our art director on the game!
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DESIGNING FREJARight off the bat, I wanted to make the protagonist a female character. While this doesn’t really have much of an impact - if any - on how the game plays, it does have an impact outside of the mechanics. In a way, I feel like the lack of mechanical changes is exactly why I wanted our protagonist to be a woman. After all, her gender should have minimal impact on gameplay. We’re not approaching this decision as if women are a different species, with their own discrete attributes. This decision was very much a non-issue with the rest of the team, and we went ahead without much deliberation or any major objections. It was a collective feeling that we'd all seen too many male 'space marine brotagonists' in the leading role, and felt it was nice to switch it up for once.
With the most basic brainstorms out of the way, I then went into the task of actually designing a character. Surprisingly, the design process went much faster than I was expecting. Generally speaking, I tend to stop working on a design after roughly four major iterations. This may seem like heresy to many artists, but I personally find that there’s a point during the iterative cycle after which any changes become almost arbitrary. I’ve been whittling down the amount of iterations I impose on myself per piece over the past few years in an attempt to become more focused on the core design. As a result, most of Beacon’s concept art and design came to a near-final stage within just a few days or, in a few cases, even hours.
Freja was envisioned as a kind of roguish mercenary, currently working with an interstellar corporation as a “Sec-Runner”. Essentially a scout sent ahead of larger security forces, she is routinely found in dangerous situations, tasked with scoping out and reporting back situations before the brunt of the main force arrives. Her backstory really took shape while we were still developing the art for her, so nothing was concrete when I began sketching the first few lines. In the end, the art did as much to influence her personality and character as the backstory.
The original aesthetic that I envisioned was intended to be more along the lines of clunky 70s sci-fi; In the same vein of Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, everything has a very analog feel to them. However, as the design progressed everything slowly became sleeker, which is a recurring trend with all my work (and something that will become very apparent as I begin to make more posts about our artistic process).
I usually start a design with a particular geometric shape in mind, and work from there. For the first iteration of Freja, the shape in question was a truncated icosahedron - essentially a polygonal soccer ball. I spent some time trying to work the shape into her design somehow, before eventually just sticking it on her head like some sort of weird astronaut helmet. While the idea seemed cool at first, and some of the team gave a positive response, I thought it just looked too goofy and playful - less like a seasoned mercenary, and more like a walking fish tank.
After leaving the design for a few hours, I came back and revised it into something completely different (another throughline in all of my art lately). I’d adopted a workflow where I would draw something, and even if I felt satisfied with the result I would leave it for a few hours or a day and come back to it. A surprising amount of the time, I would be like “Wow, what was I thinking?” and redo everything into a (hopefully) much more coherent design.
The primary references for her final design came from biking attire; her helmet resembling that of a biker’s, her pants more fitting, and her sleeves resembling a puffy 80s leather jacket, to retain some of that original “retro” feel we were going for. I also bulked her upper body to make her more intimidating, and as a final touch let her ponytail hang from the back of her helmet - a decision that will haunt me and our prospective animators for life. Still, I figured it would help convey her movement in animation and make her more fun to look at, even though its probably a terrible idea to let your long hair hang out while heading into a combat situation.
After her basic look was decided, I did several color variations and our team voted on which one they preferred - we also tested which one will read best against all sorts of background environment. And boom, here she is today - hopefully, you’ll get to see her in action soon!
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Tomorrow I will post an image roundup of tons of stuff we've been working on, including some nice fancy gifs!
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