One of the most enjoyable parts of the game development process so far has been creating characters. Using my imagination to discover how they look, what abilities they have, where they’re from, and how they talk is immensely satisfying. Largely due to the efforts of the illustrator and animator I’m contracting, the first character of the game was just fully completed. I’m extremely happy with the outcome and thought I’d share with you the process of how he came to life.

I’ve been working on level design with an illustrator for the last couple weeks and things are really moving along nicely. What once took about 3 days of work is now condensed down into almost a day. We have 5 or so levels knocked out at this stage and I thought I’d share the process on how they come to life.

I found an illustrator for my game, and he started out by creating some character concepts and a couple of battlefield scenes.

I’ve been looking for an animator and the three methods of recruitment that I used were making a blog post, reaching out to people I admired on Carbonmade, and paying for a job listing on Behance. I received 52 applications within 5 days and ended up finding the right man for the job through Behance. If he works out, then this was $200 well spent.

One of the reasons I chose Corona SDK as my development platform was because they support many devices across many platforms. But mo’ devices means mo’ problems, and one of those problems is creating artwork that scales across all devices.

I made a list of illustrators who I planned on contacting for trial illustrations, but I lucked out by having Scott Pellico go first. Scott illustrated a piece of my world map as a trial to see if his style was a fit for the world I’d like to create. He nailed it and I’m lucky to have found a quality illustrator on the first go.

I’m in the process of contracting an illustrator and so far I’ve looked at more profiles on deviantART and Behance than I can remember. I thought this would be an easy process, but I’ve never worked with an illustrator before and I never realized how many variables would come into play when searching for the right person. I know I won’t find everything I’m looking for, but here are some of the variables I’m taking into consideration while looking for the right person.