Designing humanoid characters is one thing. Designing a creature which doesn’t even exist is another. For this project, I created a supernatural monster concept for a hypothetical video game. The general concept for the game was a third-person shooter, action-adventure game where the player would face-off against supernatural creatures from another dimension.
While this may sound like I could have just come up with anything because, “who’s to say what a supernatural monster looks like?”, this wasn’t the case. Though a supernatural monster is not real by definition, it still needs to be grounded in reality to a degree in order to remain believable. At the same time, it needed to have some supernatural element, a scary quality that made it recogniseable as an enemy, and I needed to consider how it would fit into the video game - like how it would attack, move, and if it had any abilities.
I ended up creating the monster seen above, which is clearly not of our world, still grounded in reality through its recognisable elements like claws, thorns, arms, legs, eyes and teeth, and yet supernatural through it’s glowing eyes and being “made of darkness” (indicated by the darkness wafting off it).
The design for the rest of the enemies would follow the aesthetic of this monster, indicating that they are all from the same dark dimension and are all enemies which the player must defeat.
The process for this involved creating an inspiration board of monsters, animals and aesthetics which I could use as inspiration for my own designs. I used this inspiration board to create a series of silhouette sketches (seen above) depicting a variety of inhuman forms. Creating reating shapes which are both inhuman yet readable turned out to be quite a challenge, and despite including things like claws, horns and spines from the mood board, I still found it difficult to come up with more than a few different silhouettes. To overcome this I took a different approach, incorporating an ‘inkblot’ method, which involved drawing a random shape and then pulling shapes and forms from it, which proved much more effective. I then selected the best 3 silhouettes, and explored them further in development sketches seen above.
Following this, I took the best 2 into colour testing and pose investigation (see above images). I selected the pose which I felt was the most readable and showed the true form of the monster before then completing the final render, which fleshed out the monster in full detail, communicating its supernatural origins and evil nature.
