Mimi plays Dragon Age

Dear BW store - why so little women’s apparel? - posted in BioWare Merchandise: Now probably somebody is going to tell me: because supply & demand?. I have no idea about your gender & size statistics, surely the BW store gathers data from their customer database. Id be really curious to know more about that, I mean is it really that female customers are so few? Or is it rather that the BW store *thinks* that they are.   I regularly browse through the store now and then, Im…

You have an interesting voice. There’s something in the timbre, the pitch, the rhythm and roll of your words that makes other people pause and take notice. You’ve got that golden throat, that silver tongue, that prized platopharyngeal arch—and we want to hear it.

Starting at 12:01 p.m. PST on February 25, 2014, we’re offering you a chance to Take Your Place in the Inquisition by lending your voice to a character in the next Dragon Age game.

http://blog.bioware.com/2014/02/25/take-your-place-in-the-inquisition/

Dragon Age: Originsby ~Kitewing

Dragon Age/Mass Effect Mash-up (AU Cross Over)

Dragon Age/Mass Effect Mash-up (AU Cross Over)

"Did he have a little sword, or just his claws? I bet he had a dashing cap with a feather in it!"

"Would you stop making fun of my cat?"

Fenris the free elf.

To steal a music term, the hook of a song is that thing that, well, hooks you in and makes you wanna remember the song.  So how does that pertain to design you ask?  Well early on in the DA:I project I decided to treat the appeal of the characters I designed not through the eye of the beholder, compiling massive reference sheet of beautiful people and picking features I found appealing. Instead I decided to look through the lens of the narrative, and find their hook.  I just found beauty too subjective, too mushy too, too, well lets just say I didn’t find it adequate.  Luckily for me a lot of the talented people at Bioware believe in narrative so it wasn’t a hard sell to change the thinking and discussion away from “do I like what that looks like” to “does that visually say what we want”.

In the above example of Cassandra. Her hook is her power and authority.  So then the trick was merely to use visual language to tell that story.  I no longer had to justify what I thought was attractive.  Her face became all about her aggression.  Through the angle of her facial structure to the angle of her ears. It all became about giving her a strong aggressive forward visual flow.