IGDA Chicago - Meeting Report

Meeting Report

Character Design Theory

April 22, 2003

by Steve Latta

The meeting opened up with an informational presentation by our sponsor, Ed Chung, president and founder of iSeeSoft, a motion capture studio based in Ohio and a finalist in the 2002 Indepedent Games Festival. Ed and his company were great enough to provide drinks and food for the meeting at Bar Louie on Halsted.

John Tobias is best known for his art design work on popular games like Smash TV, Mortal Kombat (1-4 and associated spin offs), as well as the recent XBox game Tao Feng. John came to the IGDA meeting at Bar Louie to talk to us about his concepts on character design from 10 years of working in the video game field. The crowd enjoyed a slide show presentation detailing the concept of colors, shape, and size to differentiate characters in a limited medium from the early 90's arcade machines, through the quite powerful home console systems of today. John presented his thoughts on these concepts and how he's always applied them to each of his character designs. Most interesting to many was the idea that two characters that look nearly identical can become distinct personas with a small explanation in game and a simple color change (as seen with Sub Zero and Scorpian in the original Mortal Kombat). After John's talk was complete he was kept busy by the many audience members that wished to talk with him and get to meet him up close and personal.

We closed the meeting with a giveaway from Ed of some great t-shirts.



		Meeting Report Character Design Theory April 22, 2003 by Steve Latta The meeting opened up with an informational presentation by our sponsor, Ed Chung, president and founder of iSeeSoft, a motion capture studio based in Ohio and a finalist in the 2002 Indepedent Games Festival. Ed and his company were great enough to provide drinks and food for the meeting at Bar Louie on Halsted. John Tobias is best known for his art design work on popular games like Smash TV, Mortal Kombat (1-4 and associated spin offs), as well as the recent XBox game Tao Feng. John came to the IGDA meeting at Bar Louie to talk to us about his concepts on character design from 10 years of working in the video game field. The crowd enjoyed a slide show presentation detailing the concept of colors, shape, and size to differentiate characters in a limited medium from the early 90's arcade machines, through the quite powerful home console systems of today. John presented his thoughts on these concepts and how he's always applied them to each of his character designs. Most interesting to many was the idea that two characters that look nearly identical can become distinct personas with a small explanation in game and a simple color change (as seen with Sub Zero and Scorpian in the original Mortal Kombat). After John's talk was complete he was kept busy by the many audience members that wished to talk with him and get to meet him up close and personal. We closed the meeting with a giveaway from Ed of some great t-shirts.