Designing the Mole, the hero of Mole Munch

Greetings!

We are now four weeks in the development stage, and we spent the time working with our respective assignments and brainstorming our ideas. Me with the mole sketching and the others with their stuff.  For this week we need to prepare ourselves for the pre-alpha prenentation tomorrow at 10.20, and our Game Designer needs to send the Game Design Document before 13:00.
For three weeks, I have painted four different designs for the mole. I have shown my various design ideas to the three other graphics in the team and received new proposals on how to improve it and make it look like a playable character. Since I haven't drawn isometric characters before, this is quite a challenge for me, because when drawing characters for isometric games (such as Bastion and Transistor) you need to draw them so that they can walk in eight directions, compared with Sidescroller games where you only need to draw two character directions. You need to draw the characters in a square grid, using the lines to build up the character and make him face towards all eight angles.

As soon as I've painted the eight directions of the mole, I also need to animate the mole when he walks in those directions.  Furthermore, as one of our core mechanics for the game is the mole's ability to go under ground, I have to make an animation when the mole digs into the ground, and another one when it digs out of the ground. This will take a lot of work, and I'm not even done with the first mole sprite.                                     

I took inspiration from Team 8:s mole design, at least for the head. Me and the team want a mole to look cute.

And not like this one.

Anyways, here are my own mole designs.

When I began with the first design (below), I colored it in three different colors. The left one looks pretty blurry and the center one looks weird. The right one looks better (I used it in the latest design). I used a bluish grey color for the first three.

The biggest error with the first design is that his body looks completely flat, and crawls in a wrong angle.

For the second design, I made him look bigger and hairier, using a new head design. The hairy part looks weird, as if he came out of the dryer or something. Also his left leg looks quite curved.




For the third mole-design, I got a lot of help from my mom to make it look more rounder and not like a animal carpet or a doll. I also added fur with lighter grey colors. It's a more refined version than the second design, but I think the mole still looks like a small teddybear rather than an mole.

This is my latest picture of the mole, using the color from the right mole in the top pic. He now looks thinner and more mole-like, which the teammates like. I still need to finish some parts of it, especially his left arm.

I really hope that the mole will turn out fine and be properly implemented into the game. Our Alpha presentation will take place in friday next week (February, 20), in front of the entire class. We'll present the core mechanics, the first level and the mole. The enemy character, multiple levels, new props and other stuff will be presented in the Bete presentation on Marsh, 13.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you guys next time. Take care!