In “King, Witch and Dragon” Prince presented in 2 forms: normal and corrupted. This requires a little bit of a backstory…

Backstory

At the beginning of the game player starts as normal Prince. At some moment Prince has been beaten hard, almost dead. The Witch (I’ll talk about her in following blog posts) brought him back to life through some not very pleasant ritual and turn him into corrupted Prince. She also helped him to get those abilities (double jump, dash, wall climb, etc.). From that moment, the goal for the Prince is not only to save the Kingdom but also to become human again.

Character design

I’m trying to be fairly realistic in terms of proportions and silhouettes. Since the game is in fantasy setting it makes sense to stick to medieval cloth and armor, but doesn’t require to be 100% historically correct. That’s why Prince has one arm protected by heavy plate armor and another with just pauldron and leather gauntlet. This also helps to break symmetry.

Important thing is that player should understand clearly that these are 2 version of the same character. That’s why I keep bright accents on both characters (scarf, tabard, hairs) to create this connection.

The idle pose of each character should communicate how this character feels:

• Prince is tall, strong, arrogant and way too self-confident
• Corrupted Prince is the opposite - beaten, broken, exhausted

I created grayscale tone map for both characters (above) to check the contrast of different elements and visually separate them from each other. Then I created different color schemes for both.

After some consideration I decided to stick to color scheme #5, but later on when I was working on character’s abilities I realized that color scheme #3 fits better to the abilities palette, so I switched. Also added some details, shading and outline to mimic cell-shading style.

Weapons

Prince has knight has classic Longsword with some dragon-related decorations.

Corrupted Price got Talon Blade from the _Witch__. It has scythe-like curved blade reminiscent talon or claw of a raven. To emphasize raven theme it also decorated with dark feathers.

Character abilities

When I was thinking about abilities, from the game mechanics perspective I was trying to keep them familiar to the player, so I ended up with pretty standard set of “double jump”, “dash”, “grappling hook” and “wall climbing”.

Meanwhile I was trying to make them very distinct visually. Remember that all his abilities Prince got from the Witch (not exactly, but we can say so at the moment)? So, keeping this in mind I tried to give all abilities some “witchery” vibes and make them related to some animals that people usually associate with the witches.

So, here we go:

What’s next?

At the moment I consider concept art for the main character done. Next step will be 3D-model of the Prince.

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