As we mentioned in our previous post we recently showed the first glimpses of the redesign of our Boingo character during a press event. We will reveal the new character here on the blog in the near future, but before we do that though we would like to show you how the character has evolved from the first sketch to the current version. The first batch will take us from the first ever sketch to the design we used in our first prototype. 

When we began working on Boingo we spent a lot of time making sure that the game mechanics were as solid as possible before we even began discussing the character looks or the setting for the game. We only had a basic mechanic sketch showing a ball bouncing between two lines, so when it was time to start visualizing the character we began with just that: a ball. The first character sketch looked kind of like an evil little blob with ears. Since then the character has gone through a lot of iterations, and below you can see a selection of some of the different styles we experimented with.

As you can see we tried a lot of different stuff during this part of the process. Although we were kind of off with most of them, we quickly found the feel we wanted for the character, a strong attitude painting the way for his chaotic and action packed performance in the game. In the following image you can see some of the first color tests we made with the “cat” concept, which was later scrapped along with the rest of the intital concepts.

Finally, one day, the creature that was later to be called simply the hair monster appeared and it felt just right. He had that particular, quirky attitude we were looking for, and he was bushy and hairy. What more could you ask for? Well, we quickly realized that the level of detail wouldn’t work well with our intended resolution at the time. This made us rethink the design, which resulted in a more stylized version, which was later the one we used in the intial prototype.

Before getting the character into the game we needed to decide the color scheme. We tried a number of different color schemes, as you can see in the image below, and for a long time we were going for the moss green one in the bottom right corner. We thought it matched the setting nicely, though it matched a bit too well since the green of the character and the green of the jungle wasn’t optimal for clarity of movement and such.

After much discussion we went with a fresh orange and green color scheme instead, which was basically an inverted version of the moss green one. Now that we had the character look and the color scheme we wanted to see how he would look in the game. This is what he looked like at this point:

And here is a screenshot from the first prototype of the game showing the character. The tail was something we cooked up in one day on the tech side just to get something that moved with the character, but it has since then been redesigned. More on that at a later time though!

This concludes the first part of our character design walkthrough. Up next is the road to the new and improved Boingo, so be sure to check back here in a week or so!

Tags: Boingo, character, concept art