Racing royale - The Frog Prince

This is my latest and last project for university, featuring a response to a brief from the games company Sumo Digital, based on their upcoming game Stampede; Racing royale!

Cutting the brief down from anything in the world to anything Frog prince - but make him a racer!

Everything shared below is hand drawn and shows the concepting process I took to get to the final rendered designs.

Working my way backwards as we go, starting with the Character design.

Starting off with rough silhouettes and sketches to get the ideas flowing, using the rough nature of the sketches as a way to get used to the stylisation and proportions of the brief.

Moving on to look at helmets in more detail, in hopes of starting with all the concentrated personality a face holds, to build the character from there.

At this point I'm leaning more into the tech screen side of the stylisation, going for a more subtle version of a frog helmet, as if its eating up the racers head.

Moving onto outfit sketches, leaning into different aspects of the newly established them; The Frog Prince

Taking inspiration from frogs and onesies, all the way to a kings show garments.

Each of the design examples from the brief show semi related stickers across the designs, adding chaos and clutter to their world.

Playing around with stickers and sticker placement for my own design heled to tie it into the brief style just that little bit more.

Opting for the middle design on the bottom, taking it through to the next stage to add in some colour.

Preferring the less saturated of the designs (even though they're all fairly saturated to fit the briefs style,) with a little more variation in the values, giving them more depth.

T this stage, the Frog prince isn't feeling particularly frog like; wanting to lean into the fairy-tale theme more obviously I headed back to do more helmet iterations.

Leaning into the Grumpy and cute frog vibes as much as possible with some of the following designs. The one taken forwards is a lot more successful than the previous one, making it worth stepping back and trying again.

MORE STICKERS!!!

Focusing on having a variety of stickers, as well as less relevance than before. The stickers, as mentioned, are used to bring business and chaos into the designs along with more personality, so by making them less relevant, our Frog Prince feels like he has more depth to him.

Moving back into the colours phase, loving the deeper rich purples and the teal blues hinting at both a rich royal and keeping subtle associations with the classic frog we all imagine in green.

The final render

Looking at the reference of the style I'm aiming for, looking to hand paint in 3 separate light sources to fill out the character and help all the colours and dimensions pop in the 2D space.

Moving on to the Kart design for the Frog prince to start winning some races in.

Starting with an established theme and style keeps the options fairly narrow, however this brief allowed for different weighted karts to be designed; from lightweight, go-kart style to heavy almost monster truck like designs, balancing in the middle with an allrounder race car.

going from rainforest and pond themes all the way into fancy old Porsche inspired karts, ending with an all-rounder kart design that's elegant but still fit for racing.

EVEN MORE STICKERS!

The game allows for a lot of customisation in the way of stickers, filling the designs space with pops of additional colours as you go.

Colour iteration

Basing most of the colour experimentation on the current character design, hoping to let them feed into or bounce of of one another, using complimentary or analogous colour schemes, in some cases going completely different in hopes of using the separation to help the character stand out.

Landing on the pale off white and yellowy gold design to offset the deep purples in the character, bringing in that same shade of green for accents throughout the kart to tie them back together.

Final renders, last fixes and callouts.

Since the kart design covers part of the internal assets, it was important to call them out separately so that if someone were to create them in 3D for the game, they'd have all the information necessary, plus it helps the design to feel more functional to know that it actually fits together with purpose.

At the last minute I realised I ha a mistake to fix; the exhaust booster was on the wrong side in the turn around and wasn't making sense. This was a fairly quick fix though as the assets individually were staying the same.

Viewing the 2 designs together