Creating an original character felt like I had to create an entire universe, but really it was just one star.
The literal first thing I did on this project was come up with the name Matchy Star. I knew I wanted to do something Sci-Fi, and I knew I wanted a main character that would stand out and really be able to get people behind him. So, the first character I designed was a star shape based on a number of sources.
The process for how I did it was complicated:
The initial star shape for Matchy was a little off set for its perspective and based on the classic Nintendo star icon shape. I wanted an exuberant face and I always had the old meme emoji “Exuberant Bliss” stuck in my head, so I sort of fused the two together. The Nintendo star is a bit less expressive because its not supposed to outshine Mario, but for the Matchyverse, Matchy needed to really be an expressive exuberant character that would communicate with players the feelings that the series is supposed to evoke. Next, I added a black outline that was again not perfectly aligned to add some character. This style of cartoony outline was inspired by the sort of offset lines in Angry Birds.
For the next iteration I added some hair and a bit of a sense of vanity and ego that comes with having great hair. This could only mean one source of inspiration, Johnny Bravo:
Of course, as the creative director, I had intended Matchy to have shades. Later iterations would change them to goggles and remove the hair which was sort of a compromise with the people on the team – and Jimp, the artist who did the final designs of Matchy. I don’t like being too firm in imposing my creative direction on the team because it sort of becomes more of a creative dictatorship, and I understand that the team has a say in these things too but here is the SHADE version of Matchy:
I did a lot of iterations that involved small tweaks to shapes and shading, but idk where the files went even though I intended to save them. Some of the details were so small even we have a hard time noticing them, sometimes the changes were big and obvious. Designing takes a lot of small tweaks and iterations and sadly a lot of those details will be forever lost. To some extent each change almost felt like aliens were contacting me to help me design the character. Sometimes I’d make a change and have an itch or hear a noise and it would make me think about modifying that change even more. It was sort of surreal to put together the character and I went through 12 iterations that all had differences.
And I suppose no one can escape Simpsons Mania, so I decided to add a nice set of blue pants to complete the look:
Of course it would take even more work to get the final versions of everything, but this is how the whole thing started. We eventually hired Jimp from Massive Monster, and he added his own lick of paint. We defined the style of eyes and lines based on some feedback from our mailing list from a bunch of options Jimp presented. We also discussed the idea of making Matchy a wizard or redefining the character, but I added some more references to the list to cement the direction including Sponge Bob, Andy the Mechanic from Advance wars, and other spacey characters to define the final direction as an enthusiastic derpy goofball scientist and as a result we got even more iterations:
It really took a phenomenal amount of work to design this character even though it might seem sort of obvious now that Matchy already exists. I know that Matchy seems like a very clear cohesive simple character, but it was not at all obvious or clear on how to land at this end result, it took a lot of work!