So far we’ve looked at how the avatars’ style was chosen for Scramble Legends and heard from Kyle McGill about his process to create the final artwork. In this post we’ll look at how Kyle and I proved that the style had enough expressiveness for animation and variability for different characters. Once we were satisfied we were finally able to buckle down and create the nine avatars needed for the game.

For starters we needed to determine whether the style would support enough characters in the event that we wanted to add more avatars to the game for special promotions, seasons, etc. From our previous prototyping we felt confident this would be the case, but I like to make sure of these things before making comparatively more expensive, final assets. If the style won’t ultimately work for many different avatars then I want to find that out as soon as possible!

To answer our query Kyle produced two sets of heads trying to get as much variability as possible. As you can see there are some really off the wall characters in there. After seeing these I was convinced the style would support as many characters as needed.

The next question was whether the style would look good animated. I wanted each avatar to have several different visual states to reflect the state of the game. Ideally they would even animate between the states. In any case, the art style needed to have the expressiveness required to show the characters’ emotions. Once again Kyle went to work this time prototyping different emotions for some of the possible avatars:

Confident that the art style would support expressive, varied avatars it was time to figure out which avatars to use for the game and then to generate the final art assets. To be honest at this point I simply chose the avatars that looked fun and interesting to me!

When the process finally finished Kyle produced nine excellent avatars each with four distinct states!