Project 6 - Spite

SPITE

Game project 7 - RPG 

Spite is an action RPG about a monk acolyte returning from a soul-searching pilgrimage to find their monestary and childhood home infested with demon imps. 

This is the first and, unfortunately, final character concepts I made during pre-production. I only had 4 hours to finish them because of a short time budget, but the group felt happy enough with the third option so that is what we went with. I wanted to go for something that clearly read as a monk without relying too much on tropes. I also wanted them to read as strictly androgynous, which was difficult considering people generally see neutral characters as male by default. 

VFX

In this project I was the sole concept artist for everything except for the environments so I had to balance my efforts over characters, VFX and UI. This meant that I had to design VFX that TA and the programmers could create without any input from me. 

HUD

I wanted the HUD to fit the theme of the game without being distracting or unclear which led to this design. I 3D modeled, textured and rendered the frame in Unreal Engine 4 and then drew the icons. Same goes for all menus in the game.

Menus

Into and outro

We did not have time to animate a cutscene and I did not want to rely on the programmers for pacing, so I chose a scrolling into/outro. This worked relatively well, but it also meant I had to draw two large illustration in a very short time. I found a style that looked ok even rushed, and wrote an intro that explained the story with as little information as possible to avoid overwhelming and confusing the player. 

Enemies and boss

For the enemies we wanted as much diversity as possible without having to build more than one rig and character model, so we chose to give them over-sized masks. We also wanted them to be disturbing and and kind of weird-looking, like east-asian demons tend to do. The three enemies on the bottom are the ones that made it into the game. 

The two images on the right shows the blockout concept I made in Zbrush for our boss. I wanted a reveal moment for dramatic effect that did not require any extra work for the rest of the team. The boss is a symbol for the acolyte's old life - their diety - being possessed and vandalised by the demons. Killing the boss means killing the last surviving part of the acolyte's family and faith.