Jester Character Concept

This was a development process for concepts for my third year university project, a game named Delve. The game revolves a party of adventurers trekking their way through underground dwarven ruins in a DnD-esque, turn based playstyle, with full online multiplayer. This character is to be one of the player controllable heroes, hence the focus on one of the fundamental archetypes of high fantasy, being the mage. The Jester concept for this character had originated from designs of the head artist on our team which I then melded with my own design elements and developed into the character we see now. The silhouette denoted as "11" in the second image is the original concept for this character. For this character, we wanted to center her personality around a less stereotypical version of the mage so that gameplay functionality would be similar, using magic, but centering her design around a more playful personality. We envisioned this to be, again a break from stereotype, but also a contrast to the personality of the other characters which would come off as more cool or professional. To get this joyous personality across, we centered her design around the jesters around the 15th Century, being a big source of inspiration for our setting and element designs. That's emphasized in the saturated colors I used for her tights and, of course, her jester cap. These elements were also important to keeping the bigger shapes in the element design so that during the pixelating of the character, which would be in 32-bit resolution, could still be seen. This affected the stripes design on her tights as they weren't coming through on the sprite, as well as having to change the size of the bombs she would use during gameplay. In my opinion, the design of the character feels like it could be placed around the 15th century yet brings a more unique style to the game that is inspired by high fantasy. The design helps the roster of characters stand out, creating interesting choices for the player.