Concept Art: Meet Yumiko

As mentioned in a previous post, our first game will be a rail shooter following a band of protagonist ninjas as they defend themselves from attack by evil forces. Well, we’re excited to finally share our first concept art: Yumiko.

Basic Criteria

The two things we established from the start were:

1. We wanted our characters to have an anime feel, and
2. We wanted to utilize a 3D environment.  

We also decided that we’d have three initial “good guys:” a brother-sister ninja duo and their goofy friend fighting against an army of evil ninjas. That was the starting point from which all of our characters derived from.

Yumiko Bio

We haven’t finalized this yet, but here are some basics on the character:

• High school/college-aged
  
• Half of a brother-sister tandem
  
• Strong – she raised her younger brother and their friend
  
• Weapon of choice: kunai, Japanese daggers

From Sketch to Reality

After gathering a variety of inspiration images, we got started on concept art for our female ninja Yumiko. We wanted her to exhibit a good balance of masculine and feminine, strong but girly. The first draft was a good start, but not quite what we were looking for. The weapon wasn’t quite right and the character looked more gender neutral than what we wanted. So back to the drawing board.

After a few more revisions, we were almost there. The newest draft embodied the strong female character we wanted with the right sized weapon.

With a few tweaks to her outfit and some color, 2D Yumiko was finally ready.

Next Steps

With the final image ready to go, we submitted it to our graphic artist who we contracted to convert Yumiko from 2D to 3D.  Initially we simply provided the final artwork to the artist, who created an orthographic projection of Yumiko. This transition hasn’t been as smooth as we thought; since we commissioned a different artist for the 2D image, the 3D artist’s rendition didn’t quite look the same. To fix this, we had our original artist create the orthographic. This has set us back a bit of time, but we wanted to ensure we got the first one right. The latest drafts of 3D Yumiko are starting to look better, so we’ll apply this to the development of the other characters going forward.

So what do you think of Yumiko? Tune in next time for our next concept art unveiling!