Black Box Recording – Game Pitch Process

For my final project in my Character Visualization class, we were required to put together a pitch for a game. In this pitch, we had to include the plot of the game, a turnaround for the main character and antagonist, flat drawings of secondary characters, and environment designs.

Final splash art (Spring 2021)

Black Box Recording is the story of a young girl by the name of Winifred who is searching for her long lost parents. In the process, however, she accidentally traps herself in another dimension and must find a way to get out and continue her search.

Initial sketches of the protagonist, Winifred (Spring 2021)

Final Winifred turnaround (Spring 2021)

The first portion of the project was spent ironing out the design of our protagonist and antagonist. Winifred's outfit design was easy in some ways because of her link to my personal project–I had a very good basis for where she was coming from (a Wild West type fantasy area with some Spanish and French influences). It surprised me that I had the most difficulty figuring out a hairstyle for her. Ultimately, I gave her a ponytail so she could match hairstyles with her father.

Initial Warden sketches (Spring 2021)

Final Warden turnaround (Spring 2021)

The Warden surprised me with their design, mostly because it was absolutely nothing like I'd originally thought it would be. In my earliest ideation sketches, I'd made them into something that was relatively human-shaped, but I quickly realized there was a lot of interesting stuff I could do with their body since they aren't human. In fact, they're a conglomerate of several dozen human souls. That's what led me to making their design like this: I began playing around with the idea of human spines as shackles and the rest quickly came together after that.

Initial sketches of possible secondary/tertiary characters (Spring 2021)

The five secondary/tertiary characters I wound up fleshing out (Spring 2021)

Next, we were instructed to create secondary and tertiary characters. I decided at this point that I wanted the world these characters live in to have a cozy, autumnal feel to it, which wound up guiding a lot of my creative choices (particularly with Misarét, Jeryen, and Husk). I also considered the jobs people may have in this world (ie: I knew there were farmers and miners), though I also considered having a character or two that were monsters (poorly) disguised as humans.

Environment snippets (Spring 2021)

One of the final tasks in this project was to create a few environments that may be featured in the world we'd created. The ones I created were a church, a sort of mausoleum (in which the Warden carries out some of their tasks), and a view of the sky above the woods, where gravity isn't as it should be and things aren't quite right.

Ten assorted character sketches (Spring 2021)

Aside from drawing the splash image featured at the beginning of this post, the final part of this project involved drawing ten separate sketches of the characters we'd created. I had a great deal of fun with these and they helped flesh out the characters' personalities quite a bit.

Overall, this was undoubtedly one of my favorite projects to have worked on in college and I hope to do something more with it someday down the line!