Trying my hand at character design
Joy Mech Build
Video games take many skills that can each be their own career, each one forming its own individual barrier to making even a mediocre yet fully fledged video game. For me, someone who’d like to make video games, art has been the worst of these barriers, the most daunting. I can’t draw, and my full feelings on being a creative in the internet age who can’t draw could be its own post, but it’s not this one.
To cover my visual art needs I’ve been using Inkscape, a vector graphics program, because I can just make shapes and then adjust them. It’s what I’ve used to design the logo of this publication. Drawing people is a whole other task however, some of the most infamously hard to draw things are involved in drawing someone, like hands.
But one game gave me an idea for a work around where even I could draw characters for a video game, Joy Mech Fight, a Japan only release for the NES. It’s a fighting game that got around the technical limitations of the NES by rendering each body part as its own sprite, making each character a robot with floating disconnected limbs. And I have lots of ideas for fighting games specifically.
In my case having floating disconnected limbs is simply easier to do something with even at my skill level, I don’t have to learn anatomy and the robots don’t need to have human like hands. And with Inkscape I can animate different sprites by simply moving each part individually.
My first go at this idea was quite a while ago, and ran right into the brick wall of the in development fighting game engine I was using getting an update that broke all of my code in a way that suggested fixes and conversions did nothing to mend. But recently I felt inspired to try again. So I tossed out the old project and started again with something new.
I decided on a small and simple roster this time around, just six characters, half of what is considered bare minimum these days. And that each character would be a robot based on a mythological figure from a different mythology. This pairs with my interest in mythology, and for an inherently abstracted approach like this having known iconography to draw on is useful.
With mythology based works I think a good test is if you can tell who’s who from a glance, or if things start to click into place once you know who it is, so I decided to share this image without the names to let people guess.
Now I want to go over each one and how I approached their design, which doubles as the reveal of their identity.
Tezcatlipoca
Obviously Tezcatlipoca is going to be in my mythology project. He was initially designed for the first go around and was an obvious transplant to kick this new try off. I based his depiction here on a specific piece of art that showed him holding two flint knives.
His design is basically covered in Tezcatlipoca symbols, the yellow balls on the feet are bells, the center piece and eyes are obsidian mirrors, the mouth is modeled after a smoke glyph (which also represents speech), he has the classic black band across the face, and over his head like a crown is the ezpitzal, one of his symbols.
I had the concern that the central mirror might come off as another eye with the other two serving as eyes, but while Tezcatlipoca has always been depicted with a normal amount of eyes, he has such a strong association with seeing that the mirror coming off as a third eye does fit.
For colors I obviously needed black in there, and I think the red paired well. It’s been a while since I made this particular design, but I believe the more yellowish colors were done because in a lot of art of the Aztec deities the skin looks a bit yellow to me. The green comes from including the ezpitzal, which I also applied to the hands to spread out the color more.
While my other designs try to mostly stick to a single type of shape, he has a varied mix because of his many faceted natured, with points, rounded edges, and flat edges. Gameplay wise I envision him as an all rounder, able to do a bit of everything.
Odin
This is one of the designs I’m most pleased with. My concept going in was Odin as the classic wizard outfit moving on its own, I struggled with the question of how to do the face before deciding to make it the hat. He comes across as a little cowboy like, which made me think that wizards and cowboys are actually a little similar as wandering strangers with iconic headgear who come to town and kick off the plot.
The wizard robe may come off as dress like, but I decided that’s okay because I think Odin would wear a dress. I wanted to bring in his animal connections, so I based the feet on the feet of ravens. And the spear next to him is of course supposed to be his version of Gungnir. I’ve been going back and forth over how to size it, whether it’s too thin or too wide.
I also made a point of having him be the only fighter without a clear mouth, helps give off a mysterious aloof aura. Color wise I wanted colors that had death connotations to match with Odin as a death god, which both black and white work for. I recalled descriptions of Odin with a blue cloak, and red as a contrast fit in its own way as a color of bloodshed.
As a fighter my intent is to make Odin the long range fighter, one who doesn’t need any projectiles when he has a spear. I even put the spear behind him to try and indicate he prefers staying back and keeping a distance.
Ghatotkacha
Ghatotkacha’s name can be translated as ‘pot head’ so I knew I wanted the head to literally be a pot. Then I found a source saying it was referring to a specific style of pot used as an instrument (ghatam), which generally has a cushion under it, so I went for that specifically. His weapon is an Indian mace, called a gada.
In general I struggled to find consistent Ghatotkacha iconography, so I had to go broader. The wheels for feet reference how central chariot combat is to the Mahabharata, though Ghatotkacha himself doesn’t appear to fight on chariot. The idea here is that he’s his own chariot basically.
The central body part is actually a rather morbid nod to how he died, shot with the the Vasavi Shakti, referred to as either an arrow or dart. And you could say Karna hit bullseye with it. Because it looks like an archery target or dartboard, right?
When looking for depictions of Ghatotkacha I saw there was a tree shrine to him, so combining that with the pot head it made sense to try and give him more earthy and wood like colors. The gold color is because a lot of art of him I saw included gold. I’m disappointed I didn’t have anyway to reference his shadow play depictions since I like those puppets, but that feels more suited to a whole other design.
Also trying to give Ghatotkacha a little smirk became a massive headache. But I needed to show that he knows full well he’s strong enough to win. I know it can do a lot to characterize him at a glance.
There are brief little glimpses of a moveset in my mind, something fast that involves his mastery of illusions, like creating copies of himself as part of his special moves.
Heracles
Heracles offered few surprises in the process of designing him, the surprise was how much it went to plan. I knew going in I wanted a big blocky design with Ancient Greek style thunderbolt symbols (as opposed to the modern zigzagging line style) for his Zeus connection. And a big club as his weapon that’d help him take up more space.
I briefly considered trying to put some Chronos adjacent symbols like an hourglass on the chest as a nod to the Orphic equation of them, but that felt like too much to get at a glance. The chest feels a little empty to me, but I’ve seen plenty of Heracles art with a bare chest. Also not keen on the vibe his face gives off. I was trying to go for a focused stoic expression with the plain flat mouth.
Naturally I want Heracles as the big grappler of the roster, someone all about slow yet powerful attacks. I’m picturing his normal grab as him lifting up the opponent and squeezing them, the move he killed Antaeus with, and other grabs involving catching airborne enemies or throwing them to the other end of the screen.
Pazuzu
Pazuzu is the one example in this of me reusing a part from one character for another, and it’s not hard to see that his feet are Odin’s with a slight tweak. He has talons in his depictions, and I already had someone with talons, it made sense.
In general there was a mix of knowing what I wanted to do and struggling with ideas or execution. I knew I couldn’t pull off wings like a traditional depiction, so I thought about a bird shaped jet pack, but that also felt tricky. Then I had the idea of giving him a small wind turbine to represent his wind association and putting thrusters on his feet, which would help distinguish them from Odin.
For the head I tried to make it dog like, though making a mouth that could work like a canine mouth was too much. But it’s why the eye and the mouth that annoyingly looks like a moustache are positioned that way, like a side view of a dog. His eyes are describing as bulging so I tried to make it look almost too big for the face. The top of the head is a reference to the handles on most depictions since many were made to be carried.
The scorpion tail is something I’m proud of, because with how I set it up I can manipulate it to move in different ways by moving each component part. It’s the most articulated body part in this project.
As for the sickle sword, I was looking into potential weapons and saw the sickle sword mentioned as a symbol of kingship, and Pazuzu is a king of demons. Then I got the idea of trying to make the blade look like a snake, realized it’d be a sexual innuendo given how snakes are used in Pazuzu’s depictions, then did it anyway.
I wasn’t sure what to do for the central body piece, but the depictions of Pazuzu seemed kind of slim, and I thought it could contrast Heracles’s big strongman core.
For colors I wanted red, with the brightest parts being the ones that are dangerous, like the stinger or blade of the sword. Then I wanted something to break up all reds, so I flipped the color wheel to the opposite end.
My aim with Pazuzu is to make him a more technical character, someone who can poison enemies and hover in the air. He’ll likely be one of the last to be implemented due to the added complexity.
Tsuno Daishi
Almost everything about this design is a happy accident.
Going in I was at a loss of ideas because his depictions are all fairly consistent with each other, which can be hard to play with. So I tried simply to mimic his long wavy limbs, then in trying to position them noticed how well they fit together, like he was praying while seated and hovering. As a Buddhist abbot turned demon king I thought this was rather fitting, so I embraced it.
The head was a more straightforward act of mimicry, even the oddly goofy happy expression doesn’t feel too dissimilar to what I was using as a model.
For colors I wanted colors connected to the Japanese imperial court, due to his connections with it and being associated with earthly luxury. Thankfully a quick search just happened to pull up a wikipedia article with hexcodes of colors reserved for members of the imperial court. Incidentally wikipedia barely touches on what makes Tsuno Daishi interesting on the page about his human historical self, if nobody else fixes that I might have to between everything else I’m doing.
Gameplay wise there isn’t much of a strong vision for him yet, aside from the idea of him having a special move that heals himself and dispels effects like poison, as a reference to how he’s prayed to for protection from illness to this day.
I don’t think these designs are entirely finalized, there are still tweaks that can be made that I’ve thought of while making this post. And I need to make a decision on if there should be little orb hands for every character holding their weapon or if it’s okay that for some the hands would only appear when doing a grab.
Despite everything I’m proud of these overall. And I’m looking forward to the next steps of this project, where I’ll program the movesets of each character and sprite out the attacks. And hopefully succeed in laying the groundwork for releasing a game once the engine I’m working with becomes capable of such.
Even if none of that turns out, making these characters was a fun little creative endeavor on its own.
Optional Response Prompts: Which of the six do you like most or would want to play? What mythologies would you want to see represented in any expansions to the roster?
Cute designs!