Joe of Destruction: Week 1

Week 1 focused on getting the ground work set up in the character, vehicle and environment departments. I'll give brief explanations as to the ideas of each concept, the inspirations, the difficulties, and changes that occurred as the work went on, separating all the concepts into their respective sections.

Characters

For the character work, I continued to work on Joe. The inspiration for Joe was Rambo, with the bandanna, the military vest, the combat clothing, and the big muscles. I tried out various poses and positions to nail down his look. 

Joe Rough concepts

I eventually followed a rule where getting nearer a final design, I would do a series of 3 rough looks, that could be changed with ease, altering sections as needed to try out different looks. Making the eyebrows bigger, thinning the legs out, and changing the eye size. I hadn't settled on the final look for Joe at this point, but was getting closer to it.

To speed up the overall process of character creation, I took the template for the basic pose and transferred it onto other designs. This included the enemy goons, the basic soldier who will plague the player in every level. To make them ready for any situation, I decided on a skin tight suit with a gas mask, a kind of combat haz-mat suit if you will. 

I also wanted to really play with the mask designs, so went on to creating another file where I just had fun messing around with the proportions and size. These could be used for more elite troops found in the later levels, or general different unit types.

Vehicles 

For the vehicles, I started work on a missile launcher tank. I wanted to keep the proportions small but big, as if to create a vehicle that could only work in the digital realm. Metal Slug and Battalion Wars were big inspirations for the proportions I was looking for. For the vehicles, I've put it down to 6 designs for the rough work, to allow for enough variety, but not to create too much work. 

ML rough concepts.

I really liked the base of the sixth design for the tank variant I wanted to create, so I took the it to a new file and created different turret designs to go on top. I wasn't totally satisfied with the designs, but the first one was the closest design too what I wanted. 

Tank rough concepts

Environment

Now that we're on the environment art, I can reveal a little more info on the test level. The first level the evil cyber-terrorists throw at Joe and co is a floating sky military base, much inspired by aircraft carriers from the avengers and the floating city from Star Wars. I've included a quick mood board to give you an idea of what I mean. Like I said, digital realm, lots of creative freedoms.

Sky Base Moodboard

In terms of concept art, Environment is not my strongest suit. I use it more for planning out environment pieces, or particular assets, and tend to fully flesh them out in 3D to their fullest potential. Below show a few examples of asset pieces I'm looking to include in the level.

Basic Platforms

Helipad platform ideas

Access platform and watchtower

I want to focus on including lots of pipes, engines and circular platforms to imitate the cloud city look, as will as give a feel that there's a lot of complex machinery need in keeping the pieces afloat. 

This concludes the first week of work for this project. Week 2's post will be coming up shortly.