Before going in and designing the gremlin character, which is a universal trait for all of my current ideas at the moment being that there is a small creature involved somewhere in the game. Recently an article released by 343 industry detailed their current design methods they are using when making their new Halo games enemies.
It basically goes into how they use shapes and colours to break down the large enemy faction, so to the player they can identify the biggest threats in combat and get a clear understanding of the hierarchy of this new faction in the game.
This Idea of colour and shape being so crucial to demonstrating clear gameplay mechanics top the player and at the same time making it fit so naturally into the world and story they are working on.
Personally I think there's something to learn here and a design method I could apply when designing the gremlins in my game. Making difficulty clear in there visual design without it screaming to the player "look at me, I'm a really hard enemy" would make these characters seem soo much more real on a different level in my opinion.
I also looked into taking some notes from character design talks that have been featured on GDC. this includes the one above delivered by Scott Campbell, who works for Double fine and his work on game characters such as Pychonaughts and Brutal Legend.
- His talk goes through some of the more intricate side of character design.
- When starting the design process surround yourself with things related to what your designing, make it so its the only thing you can see "Just sit in it"
- Make a list of stuff you would just see in a world like this or on the character
- When designing aspects for brutal legend they would put concepts on heavy metal albums if it was cool enough to be an album cover it would fit into this rock and roll world they where building.
- One thing he points out at double fine is that they don't start design with the main character and instead build out other aspects of the world and other characters.
- Gather a large amount of reference
- start with lots of lists and mini very simple sketches
- make hundreds of images of ideas and shapes
- then start to close in and flesh out characters.
The other talk was a more broad talk given by several artists from the industry with completely different styles and approaches.