Wednesday, 12 November 2014

Game personalities/characters

Gamers understand that a good game character makes the story, but in order to make that game character, there is a lot of thought in the Pre-production involved. One of the main stages of pre-production to games is called concept art or conceptual design, which is fundamentally is visual brainstorming, this essay focuses on what creates character’s personality, but who are these personalities and why does the consumer or gamer remember them for such a long time, why do they keep on making reboots, and more games for these characters, as if these characters have a life of their own. Consumers and artists argue that these characters do “exist”. These game characters sometime relates to the consumer in some way or another. For example: the background information, where the character originates  from, the clothing style, the situation the character is placed in, the characters own emotions, the era, society, how the character acts in circumstances in example: when the character’s life is placed in certain situations, games are becoming realistic in contemporary times, in fact, some games released a permanent death option to these characters, where the game would have to be restarted, Heavy Rain is one example.  The consumer reacts to characters differently, the game characters production is there and there is either love or hatred expressed for that character. The characters could be evil or good, and people respond to them appropriately. The consumer at times prefers and loves the evil protagonist, who is known to be a killer; sometimes people love the antagonist character more than the actual protagonist.  To back up this information the following concept artists, and other professionals in the industries, will be giving the following deliberate indication and explanation of what processes the artists go to in order to create such a character.  The essay will be also based on the eminent features of the game characters, what’s conspicuous about these characters, what makes these gaming characters stand out from the rest, and why a lot of time is spend in the concept development stage to hone these gaming characters out. 





Reference links/sources:


Maurice Mitchell , 2013 11 Concept Art Designs That Changed Movie History Forever [online] available at: http://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/05/11-concept-art-designs-that-changed.html [accessed 29th October 2014] 

Aaron Torres, 2013, Resident Evil 6 Art Book, [online] available at:http://tiempocio.com/en/resident-evil-6-art-book/ [accessed 29th October 2014]

A little bit of concept art history


A little bit of history:

Concept artists for games became important in the 1980s.  This is when, games moved away from generic games like pong into science fictional to adventure games and eventually to popular movie titles like alien, star wars and  predator.

Originally, concept art became more trendy in the early 1990s. As a part of gaming, a lot of popularity to concept art started with animation, popular concept designers like Syd Mead main role is to create and provide visual entertainment.

Visual entertainment is a subdivision of concept art in general, the aesthetic look to characters and creature in concept art had advanced in the mid-2000s, popular game titles like that of Tomb Raider, Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid etc, were transformed immensely after the 1990's. 






Maurice Mitchell , 2013 11 Concept Art Designs That Changed Movie History Forever [online] available at: http://filmsketchr.blogspot.com/2013/05/11-concept-art-designs-that-changed.html [accessed 29th October 2014] 

Aaron Torres, 2013, Resident Evil 6 Art Book, [online] available at: http://tiempocio.com/en/resident-evil-6-art-book/ [accessed 29th October 2014]