Character Design in Mass Effect 2

Aside from art itself, another hobby I enjoy would have to be playing video games
(to be general).In History class I know we are to look for design we find in
magazines, papers, store, clothing, etc. I decided to take a different approach
in my first post and show design as a process, and how its used to create a personality.

Mass Effect is easily one of my favorite games of all time. I won't get into that,
but it has interesting characters and luckily I ran across one of these nifty articles
online (which I'll post a link to below). The character we will be observing is
Thane, A reptillian, frog-fish-guy to put it straight.

See he's not that silly looking, right?

Above is the final product of Thane. A deadly assassin with a suprising zen-like attitude. Thane is actually

very religious. This was the final Thane however. He wasn't as fleshed out from the beginning, and from the start the idea was just he was a "career assassin". The start of the process was asking many women on what

they liked in a guy. What features? What celebrities do they swoon for the most? The perfect guy concept was slowly building up. This led to a few preliminary sketches.

The Upper left face with black face paint was loosely based on Jude Law. One of many brought up celebrities by the women who were on the development team of Mass Effect 2.

The design team's concept ideas of Thane as the "perfect man". The women disagreed.

The design team had listened to the women, however to only a certain extent. The male mind doesn't like
to completely trust women on their views of men. We know what we are. The women dejected their concept ideas of Thane and thought he was "creepy", the designers needed to go back to the drawing board. The design process continues.

Thane had a reptilian descent. So the concept needed to be there, while at the same time pleasing the female
audience.

Thane with Reptilian features. Check. Appealing to the female species. Nope.

Another roadblock was hit with the next batch of sketches. The women did not agree with the fact that (in the game) that men get voluptuous all-female alien race, while women get " a guy with a fish head". They wanted someone who was more handsome. The design team began to focus in on the 3rd Face on the bottom last row.

Thane Finished Concept.

“Once we got to this stage we were very happy with the way his nose looked. We liked how his eyes were very big, and the reptilian ridges on his head. We almost went with more of a snake-like patterning for his skin. You can see these three metal earrings on the side of his head, we never actually put that in the final model. We forgot. I noticed it a while after we finished the model, and I was like ‘where are those earrings?’ But it was too late and we said, ‘screw it.’"

Once they finally got the facial features down pat, it was time to work on the clothing.
Now it came to preference, and when I say preference, I mean Thanes. The clothing,
on just what and how he will wear it, can break or make him. Dressing Thane in a
pretty pink Tutu will probably break his character considerably. The clothing was
just as important as the profile.

The first concept was done. The outfit showed a considerable amount of skin, 

slightly resembling overalls, the concept was abandoned. It was probably done

in thought to have sex appeal, but in the end designers thought he just looked like 

he was from a boy band from the 90s. 

"We weren't very comfortable with the amount of skin. We thought he looked like he was from a boy band.”

On the right road.

Opting not to show so much skin, the team quickly covered every area of skin. Above you can see the progression of the outfit. The team thought since he was an assassin, perhaps camouflage was an ideal material. Slowly but surely the camo was dismissed and they made the outfit more airy and open; Cutting out pieces here and there to get closer to their finished product.

Close to the final design.

Almost finished, they played with color schemes and finally came up with the finished product.

Final Design.

And there you have it. The design process of Thane. If your interested on the article
I pulled this from, visit Game Informer for all the details.