For the newest GameGen studio jam, the current theme is "digging deeper", and the agreed upon theme and location was a Tomb Raider/Collect-a-thon style 3D platformer, and I was tasked with coming up with a character concept.
The visual inspiration for the character were classic 19th/20th century British/Colonial explorers, archaeologists, and miners. For this, we pooled some artwork and live action resources for a basis to work off of, as seen below...
And I created a concept working off of these designs, taking into account a lot of common visual tropes. The fun thing about this, though, was that I was specifically asked to put an anthropomorphic spin on it! I really enjoy working with anthropomorphic animal characters, as they can have a wide variety of proportions and styles. For this one in particular, I wanted to try and take a fairly uncommon animal, the starnose mole, and make it into an appealing character design.
Here's what I came up with! It borrows a lot of the same visual cues from above (collar shirt, rolled sleeves, vest, backpack, and sun hat) and makes them work within the more exaggerated proportions of the mole. The plan for this character is to ultimately sculpt and rig them in 3D, and then animate a few basic animations for use in Unity or Unreal. For now though, this beginning concept sketch is all I have done. There will be more continued WIP posts as it's developed though.
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