The Benefits of Technology

Character design is one of my favorite areas of game design.  I am working with trying to draw concept art for my characters in various RPG campaigns.  This character is from the game Exalted, and is an Abyssal Dusk Caste samurai, who lost her arm in a battle and had a robotic prosthetic replacement.  Although Abyssals are typically associated with death and they do sometimes use necrotech (patching things up and making machines out of corpse parts), I wanted to make her arm more mechanical.  My mind drew a blank in how to depict an arm as clearly robotic (although I can picture things when not drawing), and my indecision shows, unfortunately, in how the lines of the segments don't seem to line up properly.    I do enjoy the effect that illustrator had on my drawing, as it seems much more comic-like, which is what I was going for.

Contemplating My Drawing Skills/Deficiencies

I wanted to juxtapose my conceptual renditions with drawing directly from observation. The one up top and on bottom are works I did from my imagination (though the one on top is a little skewed due to my poor photography skills).  As for the one in the middle, you can see that I have a much clearer grasp of depicting something I can see.  I placed them like this to try to highlight the differences.  I need to figure out what gaps in my mind that I have when drawing from my mind rather than simply recording what I see.

Dissonance

I wanted to demonstrate why I like to keep things simple, so to do that, I have one of the most over-the-top examples of poor use of colors(I designed it specifically for this purpose).  Warning, if you are epileptic, get migraines, or have any other issues with flashing lights, do not click the link below.

Seizure Ball

Working with objects

An important influence to what I am trying to do is the more visceral tangibility of the physical world around me.  This image was a project I did for my visual literacy class, which was to make a book cover by photgraphing found objects and implementing them into the title and imagery.  It kind of goes with what I was saying before about how I can work with things I can see, but have difficulty projecting my own unique ideas into concrete expression.

Working with colors

Color is another area that I need to work with.  While my favorite color is indigo, I tried it in the past and had difficulty generating an aesthetically pleasing color scheme.  Eventually, I landed on working with a sort of dark gold/brown color.  I want to restrict my colors and be either mono- or bichromatic, but I provided this image I made from when I was in high school to demonstrate the unity I want to evoke.  Personally, I actually prefer limiting color selection to only two to three colors, as I think it becomes more iconic and sticks in people minds, but if I could find a way to do it with broader range, that might be good too.

Drawing Styles

I'm working on trying to develop an art style for the game.  I wanted to try to draw some of my own artwork for it, but I have difficulty projecting images from my head onto paper.  I can draw that which I see, but somehow converting abstract thoughts into concrete imagery is difficult.  The images above are from my one illustration class, and they are images of Tony Jaa from Ong Bak.  I sampled it in gestural, hatching, and tonal using pencil.  It shows use of lines and value with an interesting kinetic tension.

Sense of Danger

One of the more difficult things I find with creating any sort of game is creating mood.  A big part of that is the environment and what kind of creatures are in that environment.  Exalted did an exemplary job with their use of different fantastic elements, but it is difficult to try to draw inspiration from something like that and still be original.  I wanted to try to make the monsters and adversaries in the game be a blend of both the fantastic and the futuristic, but maintain a sort of consistency.  To this end, I enjoyed the aesthetics found in many of the final fantasy games, #13 in particular, as it had a rather beautiful blending of the two.  The image is used to show a sense of movement, while providing a more fantastical concept.  It was a piece I did for the sake of humor in my Digital Imaging class, but I enjoyed it a lot, so I found it fitting.

Distilling Thoughts

Most of my ideas are rather abstracted and need to be put into a more solid form.  I tend to have difficulty bringing thoughts into reality, even if I have a fully formed idea.  This is one of the reasons why I wanted to have user feedback and influence over the game I was going to create.  That way, I could bring thoughts into greater clarity and seek aid in coming up with things that fill in the gaps.  The first image is an old abstraction of a rose that I did when I was in high school.  It is an old favorite of mine, breaking the image down into more basic colors and shapes.  The other image is an image I did for illustration, though I added texture to try to bring the image more depth.

Man vs. Monster

The scope of the game is to have give an epic feel, but not quite as overwhelming as, say, Exalted.  I want the player to feel the growth and development of progress more than simply having huge jumps in power.  I wanted the titular Havoc power source to be a primal shaping force of the world in the game (similar to Essence in Exalted), but rather than having it be the energy of the world, I wanted to be the actual matter of the world itself.  Every creature would have a manifestation of Havoc and its associated powers to one extent or another, even common domesticated animals.  Monsters would be more common, but as a result, the basic playable races would be similarly epic, even the most mundane.  As for the image, I went with a sort of asymmetrical balance, trying to balance the larger monster on the right with a more detailed character on the left.  My aim was to try to demonstrate the concept of progression and challenge in order to spark more ideas.

Armor Motifs

One of the signature groups in my game are the gravity knights, soldiers trained to wield magic that controls space and mass to increase their physical capacities.  For their armor design, I wanted to go with simple geometric shapes linked together in plates rate than standard contour.  I drew from suprematism, which is what the image of all the basic shapes above is.  I wanted the armor to have sharp angles, but it was difficult for me to bring such an abstract concept into a more relatable motif.  In the end, I went with sort of a compromise, but the effect seems promising.  The version ended up using the contour to follow the geometric shapes and give them more depth.  The initial concept for it was commissioned by me and drawn by Phil Fruend.

World Blender

I'm working more with idea blending, and I'm trying to think of ways to mix sci-fi and fantasy.  I want to have something similar to Rifts, but there is a lack of consistency in that system.  Rifts tends to reinvent the wheel for each type of class, making the system extremely complex.  I find the d20 system much simpler to use, but not fluid enough.  Part of me like the idea of formal classes, but without the concept of levels, more like set paths of proficiency with general, but more customizable paths for all to learn.

Unfortunately, making such concepts tangible is a very difficult task.  I am trying to work with transferring the d10 system to something more scalable (rather than simply counting successes), and possibly a d6 system.

Character Driven Design

I am focusing a lot on developing a system that works heavily on character customization.  One of my favorite features in White-Wolf's games is that they don't rely heavily (or at all even) on classes to define the progression of how a character develops, but rather uses the base stats.  I want to do a system that is more general in nature, though, that can branch out into many themes.  As you can see above, I put together several pieces from the Final Fantasy franchise to serve as sort of a conceptual idea for mixing together different themes.

Havoc Symbol

This is a simple iconic symbol I was working on.  Much like the D20 system has its own little symbol with the graphical die and the D20 label on it.  I have a separate logo, but I figured I'd work on creating a different and much simpler symbol to be used for the site and other things involving the game.

Brain Storming

The design for my game is in a very early stage, and I am still trying to group together ideas.  The collage above are of different sources of inspiration for me that I want to use in the flavor of my game.  I am a big fan of Exalted from White-Wolf as well as their Scion and World of Darkness games, and I wanted to implement a similar, though not necessarily as grand, a level of epic heroism and power into the game.  Also, I enjoy D&D's classes, but I wanted to do something like that but retain the freedom of character development that White-Wolf has in its games.  I also really found Rifts fascinating, blending the mystical with the sci-fi, but wanted a more final fantasy-like feel to it.  I really would like to hear some ideas.

Images for collage citation:

"Kain Highwind (Dragoon) - Artwork for Final Fantasy IV - Playfire." Playfire - Bringing Gamers Together. Web. 10 Feb. 2011. <http://www.playfire.com/a/game/final-fantasy-iv/images/24668>.

"Monsters of Faerûn Art Gallery." Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards of the Coast. Web. 10 Feb. 2011. <http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mof_gallery/MonFaePG42.jpg>.

Paizo.com. Paizo Publishing. Web. 10 Feb. 2011. <http://paizo.com/image/content/SecondDarkness/PZO9013-Drow.jpg>.

Rams, Vinod. "Planar Handbook Art Gallery." Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards of the Coast. Web. 10 Feb. 2011. <http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/planar_gallery/82523.jpg>.

"Rifts Picture by WttWoA - Photobucket." Image Hosting, Free Photo Sharing & Video Sharing at Photobucket. Web. 10 Feb. 2011. <http://s190.photobucket.com/albums/z179/WttWoA/?action=view&current=Rifts.png&newest=1>.

UdonCrew. "Exalted- Alchemicals." Browsing DeviantART. DeviantART, 5 Jan. 2009. Web. 10 Feb. 2011. <http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=alchemicals#/d1smlas>.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Luke Schwarz, and this blog is going to serve as a means of promoting a project I am working on to create a tabletop RPG called Havoc.  The game will also have another site to serve as a method of organizing all of the rules and other information.  The site itself will also take in information from viewers to help construct the game to provide a wider range of ideas and concepts.  This blog is used to compile a series of images to work through various thoughts.