Creating character models [Landinar devblog]

With the Landinar: Into the Void Steam page going live, we have been focussing on our splash screen and character models.

Join our 2D artist Roy on his journey of creating both.

A few weeks ago we started working on the Landinar marketing splash screen. Early in the process we realised we needed to add a female character and thus giving the player an option upon starting the game. We also realised our male character, with two metal arms and a backpack, looked like a stereotypical action hero and would not represent our game very well.

We wanted the player characters to stand out in a room filled with NPCs. Not only do the robotic limbs give the player characters slightly more mass, making them visually stand out on screen, but it was also easier for NPCs to call them out in dialogue, using phrases as “hey you, with the robotic limbs!”.

This first drawing of the male and female character together is almost a year and a half old, when we were still doing our co-op shooter. The idea was ditched, as you can read in our previous devblog, but the visual stuck with us. Because Landinar: Into the Void doesn’t have handheld weapons nor co-op gameplay, we decided against using both character models in the splash screen to avoid confusion.

We decided to heavily focus on our female character and her robotic legs, showing her unique design. I drew a couple of poses, after which our 3D artist Erik started working on making her actual in game model.

A kind of cross-fertilization happened, going back and forth together between the model and my sketches until we were both satisfied with the result.  

This is one of the final drafts I made for the marketing splash screen. If you’re curious to see how the finished product turned out, keep an eye on our Convoy Games Twitter and Landinar: Into the Void Steam page.