Concept Art Progression - Steampunk Bea

In this blog post, I shall discuss a piece of work completed during my second year at college for the “B1” progression unit. The final part of the brief required four “skill gaps” to be completed, here is my skill gap project for concept art. It is a key area of game design that I felt was important for me to improve on going forward and this project was a perfect opportunity for me to do so.

Inspired by Supercell MAKE, which I had researched previously, I decided to create a “skin” (virtual outfit) for a character from their hit game Brawl Stars. MAKE is a competition run by Supercell a few times each year, anyone can enter and has a chance of their creation being added to the game. No campaigns are currently running and so I am unable to enter my work for voting, however, I have referred to the rules and suggestions listed on their guidance page for the character Bea.

Reference - Supercell MAKE Website

When creating an outfit there are a few factors to consider, I started by deciding what my theme would be. I chose to create a steampunk-themed outfit including a burgundy-coloured overcoat, a large matching hat paired with golden-rimmed goggles, a blouse and corset, baggy trousers and a pair of dark brown boots. When designing this outfit I took lots of inspiration from different attempts at the steampunk look, I collated a mood board of these images that were found on Pinterest and Google images to use as reference.

It is also important to stick to what Supercell deem a key characteristic of the character, in my case- “Bea’s key features are her cute helmet, matching jumpsuit, and backpack.”.

I needed to change these creatively without veering away from the original features, I feel the change from a chunky helmet to a cartoony top hat and goggles works well. The matching overcoat allows the colours and feel to flow down the outfit while also staying within Supercell’s rules and guidelines.

Reference – Supercell MAKE | Bea Guidelines

When designing an outfit it‘s also key to create accessories that match. For the character Bea I needed to creatively shift both her backpack and drone to fit with the steampunk theming of my design. I began work on the backpack designs, I decided to create two concepts (as seen on the right). After gathering some inspiration on Pinterest I decided to make the base of both designs centre around two industrial canister, I then tied the two together with different steampunkesque designs while tying it all up with leather straps allowing Bea to wear the contraption on her back.

When thinking about developing her drone I had far more limitations, this is a key when recognising the character in game. This needs to be easily identifiable to aline with the rules for every campaign run on Supercell MAKE. I kept a similar shape to the original while changing the colour theme and design slightly to fit with the steampunk style I aimed to portray.

Overall I am very happy with my designs and despite being bias feel that my designs would fit perfectly alongside those already in brawl stars. If another campaign opens for the character bee that I feel would fit my design then it's definitely something I'll consider brining further and potentially 3D modelling.

Thank you for reading this blog post, I hope that I've been able to give an interesting insight to what I've been working on and that you like my designs just as much as I do!