My Characters

My Characters

After playing the games heavily advertised on Facebook and mainly produced by company Zynga. I was able to determine what I believe were successful, and unsuccessful design ideas to implement for my game. 

Although their popularity is unprecedented I found the graphics I was faced with on games FarmVille and FrontierVille very bland, repetitive and monotonous. Although there is the option to customise your playing character, the general set-up of the characters were so generic I found them all to look generally the same.

I found this in complete comparison to Vampire Wars and Mafia Wars which (although Mafia Wars is only stills) I feel has an incredible impact on the enjoyibility of game itself. I found that looking at ‘cute’ goggle-eyed characters featured in Farmville and FroniterVille irritating. This also led me to believe that the choices made behind the game's art design was in keeping with the genre of the game. So although FarmVille and FrontierVille are both similar to Mafia and Vampire Wars in their simplicity of the games mechanics, the two games (generally considered to be more popular to males) had more graphic detail and consideration than the former mentioned, which are more popular among the females.

Although I greatly preferred the Mafia Wars game I found that the start up time involved with the two,(Vampire Wars & Mafia Wars) was greatly increased in comparison to FrontierVille. Also with Vampire Wars I found that every time I attempted to play the game the screen would go black!.. I am not sure as to why this was, although this happened once with Mafia Wars also, and not with FarmVille or FrontierVille at all.

It is notable that when designing artwork for characters featuring in social games graphic detail must be taken into consideration. Not only regarding aesthetics but also how the game will run effectively.

I have decided to construct characters which shall sit comfortably between the artistic styles of both FarmVille and Vampire Wars.

As previously mentioned I intended the non-player characters which I design to be available as toy figurines, similar to the DIY Kidrobot toys.

Below are my preliminary sketches detailing possible non player characters for my Kundalini game. I have inserted pictures of the DIY Kidrobot toys as so that the general theme and direction of where I am going with character design can be ascertained.