Character Designs for Arcade Trap
As part of the Arcade Trap week! enjoy this insight into the character design process behind the short.
Big Boss Character
The final villain that the Game Boy encounters before his untimely demise is the huge (and imaginatively named) Big Boss. The character was envision as a cyborg minotaur. The extreme asymmetrical physiology created some great opportunities for the animation of weight transfer across the various parts of his body.
Ninja Characters
Ninja’s don’t need much explanation - a ninja is a ninja! 
Our particular design angle for these enemies was to give them massive arms (particularly forearms) so they had an ape feel. The red glowing eye were a small touch to set off the otherwise black outfit.
Critter Characters
These pesky creatures started out heavily referencing the Goomba’s from the Mario games. Although this was interesting reference, ultimately we decided that something a bit more teethy would be better - playing up the cute ball transforming into a savage set of spiky teeth (we used the creatures from Galaxy Quest as a great reference for this).
GameBoy Character
The Game Boy was a relatively simple design, just playing with the over-sized head to play up the cute factor. The simple geometric structure to the boy’s face lead us to give him some relatively impressive eyebrows (for a kid at least) to aid in the animation of his expressions.
Skeleton Characters
Once again the skeletons were a pretty straightforward concept - the primary design consideration was just how much of the bone detail to remove. So that the skeletons felt like they belonged in the “polygonized” world, that is the visual motif throughout the whole film, a lot of the detail of a real-life skeleton had to be removed.
Game Guy
Obviously this is a blatant reference to the jumpsuit worn by Bruce Lee in Game of Death. As this chap was only ever seen through the fat pixels of the arcade machine, we thought we could get away with this homage without being too lame. 
A collection of random sketchpad pages
Arcade Trap Week Links:
Monday: Lead animator Aldrich takes us through a video breakdown of the animation process, shedding light on the nuts and bolts of animating Arcade Trap’s many fight sequences.
Tuesday: We look at the character design stages of Arcade Trap, from early concept sketches to the final models used in the finished piece.
Wednesday: Get yer ears ready, as Aldrich’s back. This time he’ll be showing us how the sound was engineered and implemented within the short.
Thursday: I’ll be talking to game designer Adam Reed about his involvement with the two Arcade Trap videogames that AWS produced, Memory Bytes and Critter Rush.
Friday: I try my hand at constructing some of the AWS-produced papercraft models designed to celebrate Arcade Trap’s release. Scissors and glue attack!
0 comments
Kick things off by filling out the form below.
You must log in to post a comment.