How Games Are Made: Character Design

- [Danny] Hello, and welcome back to our series diving into specific elements of games development.

In this, the third episode in our series, we're tackling the work that goes into creating a character, and there is perhaps no better time to do so, with so many loud voices both inside and outside the games development world proclaiming the magic of generative AI.

And here's the thing, when the team at Torbie started work on characters, they had a problem. None of them were trained artists.

So did they turn to generative technology to fix this problem or did they find talented artisans to join their creative team?

Today we tackle the craft of character design, from the concept work that goes into finding the look, how models are made and animated, how issues like scale and lighting play their part, and so much more.

(upbeat music) - Character art is probably the most important thing in the entire game. It's the first thing that players see.

It's the first thing that you latch onto. It's your avatar for the game. And so having that be good is like the first step to a successful game.

No pun intended, there is a chicken and egg problem that we had developing the game and the character, which is when it was just a small team of just us and we couldn't afford actually having a true character artist that has skill, I had to make the initial character and learn how to kind of do the 3D modeling,

rigging and animating the character enough so that we could actually test out the game, play it, make sure the right size was there and also sort of give like early people a representation of what it might be.

And that way then we could hopefully get some funding, get the marketing going before we actually share it with the world, because once we share the game with the world, we want it to be the best version possible.

And if they're seeing my ugly temp character, they're gonna start thinking that, oh, that's all the game is, that's like this ugly character.

I don't wanna play that. With game development, the first thing you really wanna do is get a character in the world and making sure your sense of scale is right.