Mid-May Sketchpost - Updates+Costume Design exercise sketches

Hello folks. I had hoped to be returning with a big of game-design progress, but unfortunately, it's been kind of a heavy week around here. We had to say goodbye to our elderly cat, and it's left me kind of off-kilter. I keep wandering into rooms expecting to find her there.

I have done some work on The Wandering Age, poking at character options and abilities and stuff, but it mostly exists as a bunch of scribbled pages in my notebook at the moment, and isn't really presentable. As in, it's barely readable, because my handwriting is atrocious.

But so as to not leave this place quiet for too long, I figured I might post one of the things I've been poking at in my spare time: some colour-block-sketch lineups of playable characters from the Final Fantasy franchise, to take a deeper look at their costume designs. I drew them, rather than just pasting the official concept art onto a single canvas, because drawing them by hand helped me actually figure out what all the layers and bits were doing.

I have skipped a few games and characters - I skipped FF1 and FF3 because their playable characters are either anonymous, or spend 95% of the game in anonymous job-class outfits; Umaro, Mog and Strago are missing from the FF6 lineup because there are already SO many characters, Red XIII and Cait Sith are missing from the FF7 lineup, because I prioritised humanoid playable characters, I skipped the MMOs, etc, etc.

It's been an interesting exercise!

There is a shift in colour-design across the series - earlier entries, which have designs more based on Amano's dreamy watercolour paintings, tend to use a lot more lavenders and purples, cool blues and pale yellows, while later entries, many of which have designs based on Nomura's work, start including more and more browns, greys and greens. It is interesting to pick up general colour-associations as well; characters in pale blues and shades of lavender tend to be heroes, while characters wearing darker purple shades tend to be at least part-time antagonists, and so on.

But there are also differences between games that is more based in genre: the games that are more firmly scifi based, such as FF7 and 8, have a more restrained colour palette, while the ones that lean more in the direction of heroic fantasy (FF2, 4, 5, 6) have palettes that tend toward lighter, brighter colours, mixed with stark white and black. FF6 has a cast that is almost equally divided between blue/black on the one side, and yellow-red-purple on the other side. FF8 and FF15 has the least variation in general character body-shape - FF9 probably has the broadest variation.

and, with no offense intended to those who are fans of the game - FF15 has possibly the least visually interesting collection of main characters. Four characters with similar silhouettes and extremely similar colours does not a memorable lineup of characters make.

FF10's characters, meanwhile, look like most of them each wandered in from a different genre of game. Yuna is a shrine maiden, Rikku belongs in a more colourful scifi game, Lulu is a goth vampire princess, Auron took a wrong turn on the way to the anime cousin of Sekiro, Kimari was told this was a Monster Hunter game - only Tidus and Wakka look like they truly belong in the same game. Individually, the designs are fine - but they have very little to do with one another.


This is, on the whole, an exercise I would recommend to anyone who has an interest in character-design; lining them all up like this, and breaking down and simplifying everyone's costume designs, really helped me understand what was going on with them, and start thinking in shape and colour-composition when figuring out costumes.