Character Design: Homing In

A couple of weeks back I provided a little break down of 6 characters (some as a result of popularity from my questionnaire and a couple of wild cards that I felt were strong with my new-found knowledge of mascots). At that point, I narrowed the list down to three top contenders: the robot, the bull and the bunny.

In between working on my essays, I have been considering what makes each of these characters suitable or not suitable as a 2D platformer mascot.

I felt the robot was quite bland, even though his design is memorable, he wasn't too relatable and he didn't really have much unique about him. He almost struck me as more of a generic enemy or maybe even an early game boss enemy. Also, while he was the most popular character from my questionnaire - it was an unfair estimation of an audience as a whole: a majority of my surveyors were males aged 20-25 who had a lot of exposure to games. So I decided to make my own judgement against this character since I have a fair knowledge of successful mascots and why those mascots were successful now.

The bull was a solid design I feel, but maybe also generic in a way. As such, I felt like he would be more like a friendly NPC. Maybe like the "damsel in distress" turned on its head a bit. I also felt that there wasn't too much gameplay potential around his horns, in that they didn't offer many diverse options for attack or movement.

This brings me on to the bunny; while I do have a bias since I felt more favourably towards that design anyway, there was good reason to be naturally drawn to the character concept, knowing things that help make a good mascot style character, particularly in gaming. She has a lot of mechanical potential and the ears make for some interesting gameplay opportunities. I understand that the design will need to go through some more changes as it doesn't really feel like a game character yet - and to possibly implement a slightly deeper personality and to strengthen that contrast between the effeminate parts of her design with some more masculine ones (kinda like a tomboy) which will help to expand her target audience.

I don't have any art to back this up yet, but once my essays are both written I intend to move back onto art (so within the next week or so definitely) and to iterate on the bunny character design. I would also like to think about the bull as either a secondary character (like Tails or Luigi), or as the motive for the protagonist. I even think the robot character would have some merit within the same universe if I work on the design some more.

Before I jump the gun though, I'll keep things to the bunny for now. As Christmas approaches I'd like to have her design finalised and to begin looking into adding that gaming context in the new year (like some NPCs, environments, mechanics and so on).