20 Aug Evolution Of A Racing Game
Yet another project I can finally go public with. Earlier this summer I was hired by BI: The Business Improvement Company to help develop an online racing game with an Olympics theme. The concept went through several stages. Here’s a brief rundown of how we developed the look of the game:
First I wanted to nail down the “look” of the characters. I wanted to give the client a couple of options so I sketched up a few characters in different styles. The crouched runner is meant to represent a more conservative style, and the two running characters were meant to show more cartoonish extremes.
Due to a misunderstanding on my part, I thought the client liked the more cartoonish styles. So I developed six goofy runners with a variety of body shapes.
Once I realized my mistake, I worked up another version with characters that were less extreme. I included a running sketch to show how the characters would look once they took off. The characters would be animated in Flash, so to keep things simple for animation each run cycle would be viewed straight-on from the side instead of from an angle.
I also made sure there was a clear range of ethnicities in the runners.The client liked it but decided there should be an equal mix of men and women. For budgetary reasons we also cut the number of runners from six down to five.
Here’s the final concept sketch, with women runners and color added. It was lots of fun to draw!
I also animated much of the game. Hopefully I can post the animation at a future date.