Critical Reflection on Unit 12 and how it’ll influence my FMP.

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Over the course of this project, I have done a mix of practical and written research, trying to further develop my understanding of character design to help both myself and obtain some inspiration and skills to use in my final major project.

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First, when starting the project, we created a mind map of what inspires us regarding game design so that we had some footing of where to start for our research project, I ended up writing many things on the mind map, and finally settled on character design, as that has been one of my favourite things to create with projects both in and outside of college. I also partially chose it because I felt as though there would be a lot I could do in terms of research, both written and practical. From here, I started to write a list of potential research tasks and a list of potential essay questions. I started the project rather slowly from here though, starting off by watching videos that I thought would help me, but didn’t help too much in comparison to the written research that I conducted throughout the rest of the project. In terms of written work, I feel my written work and research came out quite nicely for what I did research into, and it was very informative for my final essay, but I didn’t quite do as much as I had planned in the start, this was because some of it I couldn’t find useful sources for, and some of them were downright irrelevant, and just having to juggle two projects at once turned out to be quite challenging. However, I did have a lot of fun looking into these topics, and I feel they were good for giving me ideas for character design for my FMP. I also did some practical work in the form of applying some of the theories by creating some original character designs that followed the rules of those theories, and I feel that these designs came out well and were well further developed by trying to apply colour theory to them, creating colour schemes I really liked and worked well visually. I also practiced trying to draw in the art styles of three character designers that inspired me, and I feel that came out quite well too, but I feel it could have been better if I had spent more time on each and had done more artists, but I didn’t to save time over the course of the project. Regardless of the problems, I think applying the theories made the research become much more informative, as I had practiced it, developing my skills as well as gaining an understanding of how characters are developed.

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In conclusion, I feel everything in this project went well, allowing me to further hone my skills in character design as well as being informative about what goes into character design. I feel like I’ll be able to apply this in my FMP quite well, probably in the form of having a game focused on the characters, something along the lines of an RPG, platformer or even a visual novel. I will most likely put a large focus on the concept art of the characters, making multiple iterations if need be where I apply different theories and different combinations of said theories to try and get the perfect design for what I want.