I have been working with a friend from school on the development of a fun, "over-the-top" FPS which will actually revolve mostly around the guns. I have been acting as sole concept artist on this working to establish an appropriate style and feel to the game according to the gameplay specifications and the story. Almost, like an Enter the Dragon for gun enthusiasts, the best marksmen/women and gun enthusiasts are brought against their will to an uncharted island to test out an evil genius's newly invented weapons. The winner will get to fire a test shot of the ultimate bazooka at the moon in this weapon's mad game. Below, are some of the original scribbles for character designs and weapon designs. Enjoy.
Here (above), I was playing with silhouettes, getting down some different personalities in the shapes. I did this for both characters and weapons. Later, I set to work on establishing body-types/size ranges for all the characters to be designed from. For the simplicity of the game, we scrapped the largest/smallest sizes and were keeping everything down to a couple of different sizes for just a couple of rigs.
Using my knowledge of the different gun-types in the game I set to work on thumbs for most of the major weapons, including some just to warm up with or stimulate further designs for fun. This part of concept design is among my favorite phases, since it fuses bluesky creativity with the project at hand - and I can usually let my imagination go wild. I love to test myself and see how many versions of something I can make in which each version is fair to good for more iterations. I usually find a theme or characteristic I can then travel on like a branch until I feel I have exhausted it.
