Happycake Development Notes:
Character Concept Art
11 August 2004
We had several people do character concept tests for us. The basic idea we gave to them was a human in powered combat armor, with the style perhaps something like the Ride Armor from Genesis Climber Mospeada. After a bunch of deliberation, we decided we liked these two concepts by Peter Kim:
This first one has a neat style to it. As Atman said, it looks very fast. I think it looks a little too much like a giant robot design and not enough like a human in a suit; I think a big source of this is the shape of the head, which I can't really see a human head fitting inside. One thing we really liked about this one is that the waist area looks very much like it can bend around and actuate; it has a certain ring of truth to it.
This second one looks much more suit-like. Note the vents behind the knees and atop the shoulders as well as on the torso. We figure we can do some neat particle system stuff with the vents during gameplay as you maneuver. We didn't like the gun too much, but it's easy to separate that conceptually from the rest of the design.
Peter's going to play around with these two concepts some more. Then it's likely that we will take one of those ideas and have the player modeled and textured based on that concept. Then we'll move on to the weapons.
I think that in the models we'll probably want a human face visible behind the visor... but we'll see how it looks.