2 Rocks 1 Beach is the result of a collaboration between six people. The idea was to create a two-player brawler around the theme ‘elements’, with a visual style inspired by the work of Grand Chamaco.
Each of us individually designed, rigged, skinned, and animated a character while keeping the same art pillars in mind. Each character features an animation for walking, defending, normal attacking, heavy attacking, getting hit, idle and death.
My work on the project was mainly focused on my own character called Jack, the materials for all characters’ skin with the goal of getting a ‘clay’ feel to it, and the concept and editing of both trailers.
Apart from the gameplay trailer, I had a bit of fun on my own creating a cinematic trailer for the game to showcase our characters and their moves with some Tekken inspired shots. Worth a watch!
Having each person in a team of six people create a different character is not that hard, but making sure those characters fit together is. We decided to base our work around the art of an existing artist named Gran Chamaco.
To make sure our ideas were aligned, we started by making a style guide that clearly defined the art pillars each character had to be designed around. We started by letting two people create a style guide seperately. Doing this allowed us to extract the most important and thus absolutely required elements by comparing the two style guides afterwards.
We now had a good idea of the rules our characters’ design had to follow, and that they should be themed around ‘elements’, which we as a team narrowed down to ‘crystals’. The next step in the process was to iterate on different designs, which we wanted to do as efficiently as possible. Silhouette design allowed for a wide variety of designs, and made it possible to quickly iterate on those aswell. My process can be seen on the right.
Next up: transforming our 2D drawing into a full-fletched 3D character. To make this process easier, we first drew a modelsheet based on our final silhouette. This included front view, side view and a 3/4 view.
When this was done, we could start modelling our character based on this modelsheet. The modelling process started with a block-out, gradually adding more and detail. And finally, it ended with the sculpting of the legs and the arms to add the perception of bones and muscles. I jacked Jack, if you will.
The end result is six characters that look like they belong in the same world, while each one has its own looks and personality. Mission accomplished!
