Aurelia is one the playable Hero Characters in PlaySide’s game, Age of Darkness: Final Stand. We interviewed the team responsible for her creation. In this article, we speak to the concept artist and the 3D Artist that worked on this character and learn about the importance of a backstory and a clear vision when creating Hero Characters for games.
Overview
Video-game hero characters are important aspects of storytelling in Role-Play-Game (RPG) narratives. This was important in the development of Age of Darkness (AoD): creating hero characters that had strong profiles, unique silhouettes, and distinct personalities was important to make them empowering to play. They needed to both look and feel different to stand out from up to 70,000 enemies and various actions happening on-screen at once.
Like other Heroes, Aurelia’s backstory was paramount in shaping her visual identity and style as a character. For this article, we explore the importance of concept art and having a strong vision in defining the unique personalities of a character.
Forming a vision: Starting with concept art
Aurelia’s game design lore was pivotal in shaping the early vision of Aurelia’s character. She was one of the last characters that the game team worked on, creating a fantastic opportunity to craft a narrative that intertwined with the player’s journey and that also left her with an interesting character arc. We asked Ruby Trumble about her process of creating a compelling vision for the character and how she utilised this.
"It starts with a brief from the designers, where they figure out what she needs to do in the game, her abilities and her backstory as well from the writers.”
Ruby spent time studying the backstory and identifying what stands out about the character. This allowed her to begin developing a visual profile for the final identity.
“What was important was figuring out how to capture her personality and that backstory really clearly in her vision…she's really angsty. She can be quite powerful and deadly, but she is just a kid. I wanted to make it part of her design that there was some softness she was trying to hide.”
Ruby then created a number of “loose” sketches that helped her identify the initial shape, language and silhouette of the character. Aurelia has round, youthful features that also contrast with more intimidating features like her sharp silver shoulder pads that draw the eye upwards. She has big, round cheeks and large, soft eyes - yet, she covers them with dark face paint and hair. Elements of her Light Bearer costume have been broken or modified to represent her dark transition. Parts of her clothing are tattered and worn. The sketches are explorative; allowing Ruby to find the “balance” of Aurelia’s personality: A young girl who is stuck in her own inner turmoil and fighting against dark magic.
For a Hero Character, this stage needed a few variations to “work out the constraints upfront,” saving the art team time down the pipeline. Ruby notes that “there were a couple of variations of her silhouette, and that was about bringing her whole character to life in a way that could stand out in game top-down.”
Once the sketch variations were completed, Ruby created a final concept art that the art team can reference to begin modeling. This stage was important for refining her details, textures, value, proportions and even the types of clothing can often change so that the concept is ready to pass to art. At this point, some iterations may still be needed.
“Sometimes it might just be that the concept isn't quite right for her personality or the style, or for technical reasons…so we do more iterations. Like if a character has a really long cape or fabric around their legs.”
Translating a vision into reality with 3D Art
Aurelia had strong 2D Concept art that went through a number of iterations to meet her creative and technical goals. Despite this, there were still technical challenges: Her back wasn’t completed in the concept and her costume posed risks for animation and technical art. Hana Jones, 3D Artist on AoD, took on this challenge.
“Her staff was broken at the end, with long wooden shards that stuck out like a broom. I also only had the front view of her concept art, so I would need to figure out what her back looked like. These were the two main design challenges which were resolved during her 3D Blockout stage.”
However, this was a collaborative process - the character went through a number of iterations to get the personality right. Hana used this blockout in-game to work quickly on the team with decisions.
“I offered a few designs for the team…I would work on a quick 3D blockout which I would review in game, do paint overs of certain features and get feedback from the team - such as angling her shoulder plates so they created a strong V shape in her overall design, flaring out her hip guards to add more youthful and girliness design to her, and exaggerating the stray strands of hair to match her feisty personality.”
The original concept art from Ruby Trumble provided a compelling direction. Finally, it was the collaborative process that provided the team an opportunity to truly bring her character vision to the forefront. For Hana, “this is the most enjoyable part of the process”.
From backstory, game design brief, concept art to 3D model, the AoD team worked together to create a compelling vision for a star character to the forefront!
Purchase Age of Darkness on Steam.