Dominance War III was the first major contest for me. The experience was very interesting largely because it was my first international contest and I wanted to put all my effort into it. In addition, at that time I had just started working for a video game company and I had a lot of motivation to create a character that was intriguing and positive.
The War Against The Machine was the theme of the contest. The proposed characters could have belonged to the Organic or Machine classes / races. I had chosen to develop a character endowed with organic/ natural powers.
My next step was to create a storyline that would explain my character as much as possible. I always try to develop a context for my characters as establishing their story and background leads to finding her / his specific appearance. I am also aware, that a video game character should be charismatic as it is very unlikely that players will be attracted to an inferior looking character. Apart from this, I was thinking about developing it into a 3-D game model and therefore paid extra attention to the technical details.
The inspiration for the character came from my fascination with Antique mythological heroes. The images of the forever young Dionysus (Bacchus) and joyfully dancing Maenads appealed to me as the right source for my character design.
As soon as I had completed a few preliminary sketches it was clear to me that the character would be someone akin to a female goddess or a nymph. I decided that her weapon would be her companion, a living Grape Wine (Fig.01). |
