With the look set for her hair an face I went back to the climber outfits tried out various different aspects from the references. As usual there were parts of all of these I liked but some fitted together better than others, and primarily I considered what felt right for the character and her ass-kicking role.

Had a play with colours, though it quickly came down to two favourites, the blue and pink at the end.

And here she is in her climber gear, the base look of the character as the game begins.

As a presentation preference I want to separate the concept work I have done into 3 pages, face, outfit and gear or armour, so these last sections are preliminary armour concepts that she may find in the tower.

3 Tiers or armour seems like a good place to start, so I set about deciding what they would be. Leather armour was my first thought but as it turned out, it looked quite sturdy. So thinking about what she may find there that could be less effective than leather armour I looked at Native American style bone armour, very interesting aesthetic but not much in the way of armour, still the idea of bone armour stuck with me.

Here are my attempts, the first I found a little boring, the second a bit overboard (though I may use parts later) and I settled on the third as it still revealed the clothing underneath.

Front & back.

The tier 2 leather armour, again maybe a little much. The challenge with this aspect is combining the climbing gear with the 'adventurer' gear.

Here is some colour gradients, thinking about the colours she may be silhouetted against.

I think it was mostly A, B & C which translated into these mood sketches.

So... going with the idea of a climber girl doing some dungeon delving I went on to develop what she looks like. Had three different feelings about her face, her age, how gruff or cute she might be. Decided I wanted her to feel quite tough, not going to take shit from the devil.

Painted out the body with an initial climber clothing, but i'll come back to that later. Here is some of my working for developing the pose and anatomy.

I liked the hair I had in the original sketch, though I realized it would not translate very well into a 3D model, at least not in the simplified style I was aiming for.

Also was quite conscious the character would be wearing gear and an helmet so the hair needed to work with that.

Decided I liked the tighter braided ponytail, but still wanted a large prominent fringe.

Then wanted to consider the colour scheme, the colour needs to be easily recognizable regardless of what she was wearing.

Design choices done did the front and side views.

DEVILS TOWER

01

Devils Tower is a game project my friend Joe are beginning to develop, I do the Art he does the code.

here's the Tag line(s) - 

A challenging Rogue-like Dungeon crawler where Players navigate a tower of stone between tension and movement of AI opponents. Light character progression and narrative elements give meaning to player struggle.

The Idea started out as a Labyrinth, so the first reference was Theseus and the Minotaur. I felt it could be interesting to turn the imagery around and give the player character horns, this was my only real influence to these silhouette sketches.

I went through all 16 of these before deciding which felt more like player characters and which were more like potential enemies. I love what the connotions of names bring to a design.

These next few felt the most interesting and ticketed the box for horned imagery. I tried to let the characters answer a little as to why they might be going into the tower, so far these guys are just looking to take what they can

I realized I had been seeing all the silhouette's as men, so I took these two and explored a more feminine direction.

Switching it up I went to some reference and focused more on stylistic choices, very pleased with how it turned out. Felt a bit like 'scooby-doo' meets fantasy, a modern day tiefling exploring old ruins in a trendy outfit.

I looked at who might explore modern day devils tower in Wyoming and really enjoyed the style and gear of mountain climbers. In the game players will find new gear as they venture deeper in the tower, finding fantasy gear that is better suited to both attack and defense. Here I am exploring how the character develops, and the two styles mix.

The theme in mind for the enemies is that they are made from the stone, so bludgeoning weapons work better!

Some initial enemy design idea's, the tower is awakening as she delves deeper.