The Face of The Game
- Jackie Cummings
- Mar 22, 2019
- 3 min read
From day one we knew that this game had to be about a specific person. Experiences of anxiety disorders vary from person to person; trying to make our game a universal story about anxiety would, in the end, just become an injustice. Because this character was going to be who the player spent the course of the game with we knew we had to prioritize her design and put as much thought and love into it as we could.
Back when the pitch was for STAID, the lead character Ashanti was visualized as an art student. The goal with her look was to make her look like a relatable student in her early twenties. One thing throughout our many passes at the character that's staid constant is a graphic-novel-like level of stylization.
When Taylor came to the team, and changed Ashanti to Leylo, it was clear that a lot about the character design needed to change. As well as incoporating the decision that Leylo is hijabi, we also wanted to push her design to further reflect her student career as a computer science major. We added the iconic sweater because we noticed nearly all the CS students in our class were wearing hoodies.
This design went a long way. We stuck with it for the remainder of the first semester and it was a priority to get her modeled so that during the second semester she could be rigged and animated for the game. She's still our current in-game model for testing. She was featured in the first marketing for the game in our poster for Stout's Game Expo.
Over the course of winter break it was decided that'd we'd go back and iterate on Leylo's design. Due to the importance that Leylo held we essentially restarted from scratch.
During that time a lot of changes were being made to her outfit. We ditched the bow, but not entirely. We wanted to keep her endearing without making her seem childish. There was also an attempt at having Leylo appear more mature than she was in her previous design. We decided on the hijab in the middle, and more or less kept to our original colors.
This next Leylo design was completed over winter break. During the process though we found we weren't quite getting as much of a response as we'd gotten over the last model, and there was a desire to see something more stylized and iconic.
This next design was made to counter the semi-realistic proportions of the previous designs. The issue that was run into when creating her in 3D space was that her face became very flat and she didn't quite read as a person that other people could relate to in real life.
The design was still in place however for much of the start of second semester, and this Leylo made her way into our earlier marketing materials. The design was very iconic in 2D space, but when moved to the 3D space of the game world she didn't look quite like she belonged.
We had to find a solution, we needed help. What we needed was professional feed back. In our search we spoke with several of the design professors on campus. We showed them all the previous iterations of Leylo, even the ones that didn't make it into this blog post, and a few key things stuck out that we needed to keep. Unanimously people enjoyed the design of her hijab and the inclusion of a comfort object like an over-sized sweater. They also responded better to a more humanized face and set of proportions, however they didn't quite like the very realistic proportions of design #2. We had to find a middle ground and stick with it.
The current and final design of Leylo has a streamlined silhouette, large glasses, a soft big sweater and a color palette borrowed from an old friend. There are files upon files of sketches, color studies, and model iterations that couldn't quite all fit in this blog post that also went in to making this Leylo. It took us a good amount of time to get here but we hope that soon everyone will come to love Leylo as much as we do.
-Jackie
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