Hangry Chicken - Character redesigns

Hey there! Elliot here from the Hangry Chicken dev team. 

In this post I'm going to be talking about my process for re-designing our enemy and player characters, originally designed by Louise, from the very first game build.  But first, why redesign them at all?  Well, while the original designs fit well into our initial game, our overall vision and style have changed as we've progressed in development. And so, in order to bring them in line with our new vision, at the beginning of the new semester, I set about to give them all brand-new designs. 

The Chicken 

The first character that I gave the makeover treatment to was the main character, the chicken, aka Nugget.  Nuggets original design was, like the others, very cartoonish and simplistic, with a colour scheme of brown red and white.  The first step of the design process was to do some research and create a mood board.  In the mood board I included both images of real chickens and some chicken designs I found on Pinterest that I thought matched the sort of theme I was going for. Once I had a bit  of a clearer goal in mind for the design I set about doing some initial sketches, just getting ideas down on paper, before eventually working my way too a design I liked. Once I had a design, created the final Line art and did some colour tests to settle on a colour scheme I was happy with. I ended up going with the colours you can see attached to this post, which were inspired from a real chicken that I had included in my mood board. With that done I gave the chicken a thicker black border and started painting. To achieve the final look, I used a square shaped brush with a noise texture to blend the colours together so that they would resemble a mess of feathers, I then added some shading to the chickens' bag and hat, and the final sprite was done!

The Enemy's

For the enemies, the design and painting process was much the same as for the chicken. I started with some research into types of snakes and foxes, before moving on to sketching. Once I had a sketch of a design I liked for each type of fox and snake I moved onto line art and colour testing. I didn't do as many colour samples for the enemies as I kind of already knew what I wanted, so I was quickly able to move on to painting. Each enemy is supposed to match the theme of the environment they're found in, for example, the jungle snake is inspired by a green tree python, commonly found in jungles, and the desert fox is a fennec fox, usually found in the desert.  Each enemy was also given a hat or other outfit, to tie into the fantasy setting of our game. 

So that's how I went about re-designing our characters, thanks for reading and see you next time!