Character concept art by the talented Leonardo Gutierrez.

One experience that I’ve always loved in video games is feeling really small compared to your surroundings. It’s the same feeling I get from the sketches of concept artists and architects, who often put humans into their enormous drawings so we can relate and gain a sense of scale. Only a few 2D games have made that sort of impact on me (Super Metroid being the best example), but the extra dimension in 3D games seems to push this further. I liked exploring the open fields of The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess, finding the secret caves and treasures strewn across the landscape. I liked climbing up the fur of the towering creatures in Shadow of the Colossus, getting a dizzying sense of height while they thrashed me around like a parasite. I liked jumping to superhuman heights in Crackdown, where leaping over skyscrapers was the fastest way to get around the city.

In Atmosphir, this has always been one of our goals: to use the open atmosphere in the 3D space to our advantage. We want to have huge environments filled with secrets, caves, treasures, flags, and more that encourage exploration and discovery. Hopefully vertigo kicks in when you’re 50 stories off of the ground, trying to make a critical jump without falling into the abyss below. If you feel small playing Atmosphir, we’ll be happy.

By the talented Leonardo Gutierrez.

The central concept behind the main character of Atmosphir, Hero, is that he’s the 3D equivalent of a stick figure. Simple, neutral, universal, and iconic. A fun little guy who has some pretty great athletic abilities….which luckily allows for some nice gameplay possibilities.

Simplicity was a primary driving force in the character design right from the get-go. I remember watching a television special on the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, and one of the architects was talking about his rationale for the unique shape of the building. He felt that things became iconic when you could sketch them on the back of a napkin in ten seconds with only a few simple shapes and lines…like the Eiffel Tower, Mickey Mouse ears, a Coca-Cola bottle, the Nike Swoosh, and so on. Well, that’s exactly what we were shooting for here.

Running and jumping are our Hero’s biggest strengths, so we developed the character around those abilities and exaggerated the corresponding parts. In that sense, gameplay was the most important justification behind character design decisions. His oversized features and spaghetti-style limbs are meant to emphasize these actions in animations. And the eyes and mouth alone have an effective range in displaying emotion; I mean, Mr. Potato Head taught me that.

We definitely wanted to give people plenty of options to personalize who they’re controlling, so you can think of this little guy as just a mannequin. A rough draft. The kid under the Halloween costume. He’s a neutral body who might be covered in layers of special objects and articles to become more individual, so you might make him look like a giant robot or panda or human or whatever…but more on that some other time.

We also threw together several quick 2D animation tests in Flash to explore how the Hero came to life when put into motion. This one was done just using the simple shapes from the vector concept art. As you can see, Hero’s got some mad ups.

The leap from 2D to 3D is always a big jump, and with our Hero, we quickly realized that some things got lost in the initial translation. His features were a little too human-esque, and his rounded bulging eyes made him seem more alien or bug-like.

We basically started from scratch again with the 3D version of our Hero, but the changes really helped give him a look and personality more in line with our original intentions. In short, we wanted him to be more like a plush toy and less like an action figure. By de-emphasizing the shoulders and elbows/knees, he gained a more cartoonish and fun feeling, as if he had been modeled out of Play-Doh.

So there you have it. With a few more animation tweaks and graphical enhancements, this is the guy you’ll be controlling in the not-too-distant future, and I think he embodies most of the ideas we’re going for with Atmosphir.

Solid gameplay. Simplicity. Imagination. Emotion. Fun.

Now if only he had an interesting world to explore…

I thought you might enjoy seeing the design progression of the Atmosphir name and logo. We wanted something clean, fun, and iconic that somehow represented the platform-based gameplay. I went back and poked through some old draft files and folders, and these were some of the more interesting variations: