Stampede: Racing Royale - Character & Kart Cosmetics

This project was completed during my final year at Staffordshire university studying Concept art; this was my response to a brief set by Sumo Digital to create concepts for cosmetic items for 'Stampede: Racing Royale'. I created a cyclops inspired Racing jumpsuit, with a futuristic helmet with LCD screen visor, alongside a max max inspired Heavy Kart.

Initial sketches (and exploration) for Helmet and jumpsuit.

Vehicle design was a new discipline for me to explore, to help me with this I utilised Blender to create a simple 3D model which I could draw-over, this really helped streamline the process.

Colour palette exploration for the racer. I wanted to explore a lot of different avenues, looking at some extremely vibrant palettes before eventually landing on a bronze metallic design based on feedback from my peers.

Colour palette exploration for the Kart focused around patterns and trying to decide if and how weathered I wanted the vehicles paint to be. I wanted to do something that wasn't present in game currently (or that I have seen art for), and so gravitated towards a chain themed design.

Once my colour palette had been defined I created some stickers and could be placed onto the outfit. Sumo Digital emphasised the street art inspirations that the game follows with most of the cosmetics having some form of personalisation from the character wearing them, be that paint splatters, graffiti, or most commonly stickers.

Something I enjoyed when playing Stampede were the expressions and emotes the Racer would do in reaction to the gameplay. Shock at incoming attacks, Happiness at winning and Frustration at getting blown up among many others.

I wasn't sure how my Racer would emote, so I explored what the digital eye on their helmet could do. I knew that morphing into emoticons could be interesting but didn't want to limit how often the actual eye would be seen by players. I decided to reserve emoticons for more extreme emotions.