In this post I'm gonna explain a little about the design progression for the main character of PSW.

I started off with some sketches of various different faces, in a variety of styles, just to get some stuff onto paper, thinking about the character bio as written by Abdul, our Designer/Producer. Started thinking about body type and clothing mostly to begin with, as beat-em-ups usually have to have quite clear, iconic, character designs.


Then, talking about it with Abdul, started narrowing down a face design, as well as trying different clothing options.

As we started to get closer to a design we were happy with, we tried various minor additions and tweaks to the main character's clothing, armour and colours.


Added a headband, stronger knee and arm guards and more armour around his waist. Done.

Then I produced the model sheet, a guide to the character's design for everyone to be able to follow and understand more about the character when creating animations and other artwork. This is particularly important to ensure consistency when creating art in 2D, where character proportions other parts of the design might be misinterpreted by artists who then produce 'off-model' artwork.

The character's pose in the game went through various revisions, as well as his colour design. The colours were designed bearing in mind the kinds of colours that would be found in the environments - consistency is very important to keep everything in harmony, especially his saturation and brightness levels since we won't be able to tweek these from environment to environment.

Testing out the main character against one of the backgrounds, to tweak the colours further and also get a sense of scale.

And finally...Project SW’s main character, as he is right now. As rendered in 3D. At the moment we’re experimenting with the idea of having the characters be pre-rendered sprites, so we can re-use animations across different characters. A lot of “2D” games these days work this way, such as New Super Mario Bros, and Shadow Complex. It’s a shame to lose the nice hand-drawn look, but on the plus side the animations will all be silky 30fps smooth.

The Wolf character started from a very quick sketch...


And then I started to refine the design and think about colours. I wanted him to be more human than animal, for the sake of having more options for attacks this way.



The model sheet for the wolf in his current incarnation. His pose is much more aggressive than the Samurai's and he's much larger (although hunched over so it doesn't look so big compared).

More minor tweaks:


The Wolf character continues to evolve, I still have things about him I'd like to tweak further. Almost there!

- James