GDC 2013- Samantha Sexe

Post date: Apr 01, 2013 1:30:54 PM

One of the first things that happened while I was at GDC, was the talk I had attended. I had gone to a session from Scott Campbell called “Creating Amazing Characters”. As I have ambitions of being a character artist, I figured this would be an imperative talk to attend. Originally, I had an expo pas, so this talk would not be available to me, but Ringling was nice enough to surprise me via volunteer lottery to attend one talk. After much thought, this was it. 

Scott Campbell is responsible for much of the designs of the characters for Double Fine studios. He gave us some insight on his thought process in creating a character. One thing that highly affects his work is that he must have an intricate background story for his characters. The deeper the better. Now everything about this character must reflect this story. No unnecessary additives can be made unless it somehow fit in the context of the background story for this character. From there he collects reference. Reference for just about anything; shapes, faces, people, textures, clothes, anything.

Now, what I found interesting about how he made characters was two things. One, he never starts with the main character. He never thinks about who is the main character, he just makes a bunch of characters and decides which one would be the most likely to be the main. Two, the personality he gives his playable characters has to fit the player mood or experience for the game. For example, when he was making the main character of Brutal Legend, he did make a few intense, hardcore characters in his first passes, but upon mulling over how he would feel over events to happen (like a volcano erupting liquid metal over giant skeletons) he would probably not care while the player would find the experience amazing. This kind of disconnect between the playable character and the player does not make it a good character design. You want them to be more or less on the same wavelength.

First character design of main character of Brutal Legend. Later versions were less macho, more Jack Black.

So, for his personal process, Scott goes through a fluid list of steps. He gathers reference (tons and tons of reference to set the mood and feeling), he makes lists to let it flow and relax, every now and then changes up his medium with which he draws with, makes gestures and shapes to figure out the silhouette and shape language, closes in on characters (scanning and using value to flesh them out), puts them in game situations, narrows it down to one, then reiterates designs on that one character to make it better.

After that, it was a sort of a test run to try it out for ourselves, so he gave us time to draw out a character with a minimal description (in this case, a sad, old golem with no friends but his rocks). If you want, I can scan my drawings from this stage and show you how I tried to follow his process. After this talk, I went to a few other sessions open to my pass. They were “Interactive Fiction: Traditional vs Potential” and “Men Are From Mars, Women are From Ferelden”. The former was quite dry and difficult to follow. He tried to talk about only one genre of game and to make them work. The genre was on par with text-based adventures, though he tried to keep himself and what he was talking about displaced from those types of games. He did have some interesting general remarks on player choice that I found interesting. One was that to make gameplay more meaningful, all of the player’s choices have to matter. Except, in doing so, causes the narrative harder to control and to level out. Some of the things he talked about were the use of player choice and the manipulation of gameplay to allow moments of narrative and character development. Also, the gameplay should match the pacing of the narrative. If the narrative is becoming fast paced, so must the gameplay, and vice versa. A good example he brought up was The Walking Dead. If you haven’t played it or don’t know about it, here is a breakdown of the choices you can make  and how it affects gameplay, the narrative, and even the player’s emotions: http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/31/the-walking-dead-season-one-plot-graph/.

For the second talk, I cannot say I learned more from it, but it was an interesting talk and piqued my interest after I gave it some time. She was attempting to explain the difference between npc romance with the player between women and men and how differently each gender wants something. Just an amusing point, some of the preferences women have makes annoying characters for men to play with.

Pictured here: Women's favorite choice in Dragon Age and men's most annoying character.

After I had attended these talks, I had tried my best to explore the expo floor and get portfolio reviews. I also volunteered Thursday, but that’s a lame excuse. It’s better to work out what I had learned. First cool thing: NeuroSky’s mind sensor controller. By this I mean they made a headband that can calculate how focused or calm the person’s mind is. By using these two values, they can be used in games to control two different mechanics. In the example kickstarter game, it was a psychic deathmatch in which you use the focused value to pick up objects and throw them at the other player to kill them. The lower your focus, the harder it was to lift and object. The more focused, the easier it was. There were other cool things on the floor that I saw, but this one definitely stood out.

For the rest of this paper, I will add the advice and wisdom I gained about my portfolio. Some of them were mixed, as I expected, but nevertheless useful. One of them was that if I wished to pursue a career in character art, I had better be the best (I knew this, as well as starting out in environment art). One thing that would impress people would be to do more sculpts of characters, especially high poly sculpts. More emotion and better poses to give life to my characters would be ideal. Also, I got advice that if I so truly wanted to be a character artist for one company, take a look at their concept art and sculpt some of their characters. Also, add more process into my portfolio.

Now for my environments, I had especially gotten some great advice from one of Sony’s environment artist. He told me not to worry too much about poly count, as long as the shapes of the meshes hold. Experiment more with smaller, closed spaces and really dig out details. One good rule he gave me was that 8 meters by 8 meters of mesh is equal to 1024 by 1024 of texture space. This a great way of going at texel density since I kind of judge it as I go along, so it’s a bit more concrete. A fun joke he said (which may very well not be a joke) was that if the character artists can drop about 25k polys in his level, this his meshes could go that high as well.

All in all, my favorite piece of advice that I want to keep in my mind as I continue to work is to not aim for real life in my work. Real life is boring. The whole point of games is to better than life, so aim higher than real life and make it better than real. And that concludes what I find to be the greatest things I have learned this GDC.