#graphics-design

This project consists of a character design based in the Rayman universe as well as the animating of said character and video editing to put the character into a game.

Reasoning

Rayman Origins took the Rayman game series back to 2D platforming (as the first Rayman game was), but while a variant of the old antagonist “Mr Dark” exists in the new game, the actual Mr Dark is not present. Neither was he in the next title, Legends.

This was a soft let down to a lot of Rayman fans, and it drove me to design and animate a Mr Dark for the game and fake his appearance in it. But drawing Mr Dark was not enough for me.

As you can see in the image above (from the original Rayman game), Mr Dark is a cloaked character, and I thought I would make a design of him without the cloak. A Mr Dark Origins, so to speak.

Character Design

In my personally thought-up lore, Mr Dark was the first “Rayman” - a hero of the Glade of Dreams. He existed long before Rayman was created, and for the longest of time he was just as good and looney as the Rayman we all love. But slowly something began corrupting him, and he slowly turned “Dark” and evil. The above design hopefully reflects this lore.

Making Him Breathe

Next step was to make him live and breathe. I animated him using Spine, and then first gave him a brief cameo in a Let’s Play video to tease him. Quite a few people thought he was the real deal, and I played along for a while. Then I gave him his own video:

Coding Pirates GameDev logo design

I designed this logo (assisted by Johan Kaaber) for the GameDev department of Coding Pirates (in which I volunteer myself).

The challenge of this particular piece of work was, that it needs to reflect both Coding Pirates as a whole (hence we needed to follow their graphical guide) but also the GameDev-department as a stand-alone unit. It was especially important to me, that the logo mirrored our personality and not just what we do. Our “hack” of the original logo (altering the C and the P) was one way to do this, as we like to do our own twist on things and gladly bend the rules to achieve this. Following is the original Coding Pirates logo for reference:

The first intended use for the logo is to place it on the back of a hoodie for the volunteers to wear (image in the end of the post). To accompany this logo I made a small variant as well, to be placed on the chest of the hoodie (but also to be used in places where the full logo is too big):

Here I chose to remove as much text as possible and only kept the new GameDev-specific elements, however Coding Pirates as a whole is still represented in the style and the use of the mascot, Captain Hack. I also made a variant with the GameDev text, though I believe the hoodie is better of without it (but for other uses, having GameDev as part of the logo makes the most sense):

Two times I have been making courses in Photoshop at Studenterhus Aarhus as part of their Graphics Monday initiative. Last time was October 19th 2015.

The course was an all-around course were I taught students the basics of Photoshop, both in terms of creating things from the bottom up (utilizing tools like brush, selections, masks, layers and lots more), but also in terms of manipulating already existing material. 

My brother is working on a new card game (or, at least a game utilizing cards), and he needed a design for the cards. This is what I came up with (though I will probably alter them as he further develops the game).