"The end of the world can be quite the character building experience" - Jack Wall, 16/09/12.
So all terrible puns aside, as you already know we were asked to create a character for a post apocalyptic setting of our choice, so before we go any further it would probably be wise for me to give you a short insight into what mine was.
When I first came into touch with the brief I had a sit down with a group of friends (which is generally the way I start all my briefs), and began to theory-craft over means of apocalypse that wouldn't be common amongst the other students; I wanted a theme that I could try and pin to my character design as best as possible. As we progressed through our discussion I decided that I wanted something involving the sun, the light and heat it provides for the earth to somewhat rely on. I was staying with my sister in London at the time for Hackney music festival, and spent a lot of time passing through train stations, when a book cover caught my eye from a stand in WHSmiths. It was the cover of National Geographic, fronting a close up image of the sun, in the midst of a solar storm.
Without reading it I was already slightly aware of the effects a solar storm can have on the earth, mainly causing disruption to technology without any direct effects on the human race (that I knew of). Fortunately for me I have a friend that studies science at Durham University currently in his masters year, so I'm pretty certain he knows his stuff. I told him about my project and that I was trying to provide a reasonably accurate means of creating a pulse similar to that of a solar storm, but with a means of creating a force that would instantly wipe out the majority of the human race at an unbelievable rate. Now tampering with the sun is an easy way to destroy everything, the only problem is that I needed people to some people to survive to keep the race going. I've just realised that I've spent a lot of time here already so I'm going to give you a short (for real this time) explanation for what we came up with.
Set in the future where technology would have been more advance, a crew is sent with a rare material to another planet in attempt to create a means of living there. During the flight a malfunction occurs killing the crew, causing the shuttle to stray off coarse and eventually get caught by the suns gravitational pull. This pulls the shuttle directly into the sun, causing a heated reaction between the material and the sun, producing an increase in the suns intensity. A flash occurs, and the suns natural heat is increased by the slightest amount. This kills a large proportion of the planets population, leaving some survivors with cancerous conditions, and UV reactions to the skin, others were left unscathed by the effects, slightly influenced by the positioning of the earth on its axis, mostly influenced by sheer luck.
So that is a brief back story to the cause of my apocalypse, and a slight inside into what some people will be dealing with. Now as for the game, it would have been set further into the future where civilization would have picked itself back up again, and people would have been born into the new world without knowing of the old.
This is the photoshop black and grey of my character. Unfortunately I didn't gather as much reference as I originally planned, as I started drawing the rough, I got too caught up in trying to practise photoshop rather than design a logical character to fit the plot. However, my character plays the role of a mercenary that early on in the game would take part in paid kill jobs for clients before getting caught up in a bigger plot of the story.
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