Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Silhouettes
When designing the character for your game, you want players to immediately dif-
ferentiate it from anything else in the game and (hopefully) identify with it. A basic
way to achieve this goal consists of creating a strong silhouette for your character.
A strong silhouette helps your player quickly identify the main character against the
backgrounds and tell it apart from the other game objects in the scene. As human
beings, we recognize patterns. A strong silhouette represents a pattern that our brain
can easily spot so to perceive it as different from anything else in the game to posit-
ively affect the gameplay of your title.
A very useful technique to check if your character fits the requirements of good char-
acter design is to shade the character black and check if it can be recognized by its
silhouette. If the silhouette looks nice and distinctive, you will know that once it will
be scaled down to fit the size of the screen of a mobile phone, it will still be well re-
cognizable by your players.
The following figure is the silhouette of a very popular game character. Can you re-
cognize him?
