Game Character Design Services

Character design is the process of visualizing the character for the players of a game. However, it’s a lot more complex than it sounds. Game character design consists of multiple stages and requires a lot of work not only from the character artist, but from the game design and development team as well. A big part of character design is the discussion. To make a character relatable and interesting to players, the artist needs to be able to capture not just the physical traits a client asks for, but all the inner workings of the character too. The personality, the emotions, and the expressions, players need to see everything on their screens to feel closer to the character and to the game. Designing characters also differ for 2D and 3D games. Although 3D characters aren’t essentially harder to create or more complex, the processes for their creation tend to be different from those in 2D design. For example, the movement is more dynamic in 3D than in 2D, as is the transition between facial expressions, which means animating them takes longer. A game character designer is someone who is not just talented and creative but also disciplined, attentive to detail, and flexible. It’s their job to shape up an idea into an almost-living being that’s unique and memorable yet fits perfectly into the game world.

A full-scale design of a character for a game involves several specialists, it’s a joint effort. First and foremost, it’s the game designer and the character artist as well as the game writer (though sometimes, the game designer is also the writer). This team’s task is to create a character who’s comprehensive, relatable, attractive, and most of all, interesting for players. An interesting character is three-dimensional, but not in terms of 3D art — they can be in 2D or 3D art-wise — but in that they’ve got a personality, a story to tell, and a part to play in the game’s plot. To create a character like that, before you make decisions on their visuals, you need to draw up their backstory and personality, habits, mannerisms. Such details will play into the game plot and with a talented artist they will also be reflected in the aesthetics, such as clothes and facial expressions. In a 3D game, it can even be the particular way they walk — an exaggerated swagger or a limp, for example. Only with most of the details written down should the character design task go to a character artist. The artist will then sketch several prototypes for a character and offer them to the client for review. When the client chooses a particular sketch and the artist makes any requested changes to it, the art goes through sketching poses, expressions, and coloring before being transferred to animation and inserted into the game.

Outsourcing parts of game development is a widespread practice nowadays, and it’s particularly popular in regard to visual assets. The widespread misconception is that it’s just cheaper but in reality, partial outsourcing has more important benefits than simply saving money.

• By offloading certain tasks to a character design studio, your team can focus more intently on tasks that can’t be done by an outsider as easily, for example, tasks related to R&D and decision-making.
• The wide pool of available artists is the biggest advantage of outsourcing studios. You’ll significantly reduce the time and effort needed to gather a team of qualified designers for the project if you hire a character design agency.
• Outsourcing character design for your games means you (or rather, the character design agency you hire) can distribute the task to multiple artists, so that it’s completed more quickly. For an in-house team, that would mean hiring more people — probably on a temporary basis — and providing them with somewhere to work, hardware, and software, which is costly and restrictive. Agencies are more flexible with this, they can move employees between projects faster.
• The higher level of competition in outsourcing means that each character artist for hire in an agency is continuously upgrading their skills. Moreover, artists in studios work on different projects all the time, gaining experience faster than in-house artists working on the same game for a prolonged period of time.

All in all, outsourcing character design to a specialized service provider can shorten time-to-launch and alleviate some of your and your team’s headaches.