Hello, I'm back! In the previous part of this tutorial series. We started some really basic concept sketching and planning for Top Down Doom. In this one, I took it a bit further with the addition of "Doom Guy", the player character! Someone on Twitter suggested that I draw Doom guy as his iteration design from Doom: Dark Ages. I thought that was a SPLENDID idea, although I haven't copied the design exactly, but I took the shieldsaw. Anyway with that said. We started with this sketch layout of the map.
But I was thinking a little longer. I wanted to include some mob of pinky enemies charging at the player and I wanted the player to have the shield saw, trying to defend himself from these oncoming pinkies! So here was the new plan, and this still takes place on the right side of the screen.
Just pretend those are pinkies for now. Something like that will get polished later. I sort of improved their shapes for now, but not totally complete sprites yet. Since that will happen in some other part of the series.
Ok, about Doom guy, we absolutely should use reference for him at this point if we want him to look good. The pose I just kind of had to make up, but it helps to get images of Doom guy, the shield saw, check out the Dark Ages trailer, and then just try to come up with something like I did above. Once you feel like the pose is good, then you can start detailing with whatever feels most comfortable first. I think the helmet was easiest to start with. I just drew it from front view and large enough in proportion to get that chibi Zelda look.
The helmet is overlapping the shield, which shouldn't be the case in the end, but it helps with just making sure the helmet design is good enough to move on to the next part. Anyway, here's with the shield in front. Not shaded or anything yet, I think it's better to do that later, but the shapes are nice.
Ok now we can draw Doom guy's body which will help a lot for the sprite.
Not too hard right? I hope not. I didn't draw his arm yet, because we need to plan this out first. He's pulling on the ignition cord for the shieldsaw since it works kind of like a chainsaw. I find that the easiest approach for this is to draw his hand position first, then render out his elbow and the cord. So we can start with something like this. This is his hand, but he wears a brown glove.
So you can see that looks about right, and we can try to imagine the rest to fill in the blanks, like I've done here. The cord is a sort of chain material.
There's only one thing left (for the most part): the shield obviously! These additional details on the shield give it a rounder look due to the shading. The scratches give it a slightly used look. That's that for the shield, but I also moved it a little further in front, defensively since there are pinkies in close proximity now, and so he's holding it more balanced as he pulls the chain. Also his body and head are rotated slightly more towards his right now and his visor is more reflective. I added a shadow below him too in case you have noticed!
These changes give the sprite a MUCH more polished look against this bland scene, but that's ok. We take this one step at a time.
Alright so that's it for now. Thanks for catching up on this mockup tutorial series. I will have to figure out what comes next, but please stay tuned!