Snowmania Dev Blog 5 - Game Characters

When it came to designing the characters for Snowmania, the primary colour theme felt fitting as it emphasised the game’s juvenile playground feel, using bright blocky colours to mark distinctive differences between the player characters. It felt important that the concept art style reflected this, so the concepts are drawn in a cartoon style using block colours.

Although many more cosmetic character skins will exist as part of the game’s economic system and character customisation incentives, the two example skins that I drew were the snowfield and city skins. Each level has its own distinctive look for the characters, and when a player wins a match, that level’s character skin is then unlocked and is available for purchase using premium currency, and if purchased then the player can use this as their default skin in all levels.

I decided to make the snowfield level’s skin a basic ‘winter’s day’ outfit with a coat, boots, long trousers woolly hat and gloves each reflecting its respective character’s colour palette. Although they are very similar, each character’s jacket varies slightly with different embellishments such as pockets and zips.

The city skin is is based on a football kit, inspired by the fact that the game revolves around people playing a sport involving controlling the movement of balls with their feet. This comparison helps to bring the concept of Snowmania into the context of an urban city environment.

Johnny Rapid in snowfield and city skins

Blaire Storm in snowfield and city skins

Sara Shiels in snowfield and city skins

Milo Wyndham in snowfield and city skins

To develop the character’s personalities and make players feel their liveliness, each character will be brought to life by having a variety of recorded vocal catchphrases to say during the character selection stage. The game is not very story-oriented, and the action of the characters is controlled by the players. Therefore there are not a lot of opportunities to showcase the personalities and traits of the characters outside of the character selection screen. This is where players will be able to view the character abilities and statistics, and where the distinctions between them are determined.

As a result, the vocal phrases said by the characters will be able to pack a large amount of personality into a few seconds of content, due to a vocal line showing character through voice, intonation and the content of the catchphrase. Most of the catchphrases are silly plays on words on the characters names or abilities, such as Blaire Storm’s ‘We’re gonna cook up a storm!’. The phrases can be found in the audio section of the game design document.