Gamasutra: Anna Jenelius’s Blog – Armor for Dummies and/or Game Developers

Gamasutra: Anna Jenelius’s Blog – Armor for Dummies and/or Game Developers

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

A handy armor design 101 for games (but works for other visual media as well). It approaches a lot of tropes we often discuss, like the importance of covering vital body parts or the absurdity of adding boobplates and high heels to female armor.

I especially like how the article handles the double standard in gendered armor silhouettes, a subject we alluded to before a few times, but didn’t have opportunity to talk in depth about. Thus, here’s an excerpt:

Tight armor and layers

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Looking at the Demon Hunter (Diablo III, Blizzard Etertainment, 2012) above, you will notice that while her shoulder pads and scarf increase in size with her armor level, her waistline does not. In this case, it looks like she keeps wearing only some sort of leather corset to protect her stomach, while strapping on enough excess metal on the rest of her body to build a spare suit of armor. Honestly, I would have advised her to trade the sexy female silhouette for actual protection. This would mean adding for example a gambeson and maybe also a mail under the harness, which would make her waistline several inches thicker.

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[source]

[…] While you would most likely want the layer that looks like leather here to be padded to soften incoming blows, and the harness probably is too tight to actually move around in, it shows quite well how layers are put upon layers in heavy armor. This sadly means that you’ll have to choose between looking like an hourglass and surviving while fighting.

Bolding mine.

Thanks to storiesfromthevoices for directing that link at us!

So yeah, that’s also why we don’t settle on announcing any outfit “good” just because it covers more skin than a bikini. You can’t just paint a skin-hugging suit silver, label it “armor” and call it a day. Armor design doesn’t work like that.

~Ozzie

more on why padding is crucial in armor designmore on armor design | more reference | more resources

This week we’re bringing back the nice little guide to armor design for fiction, with special emphasis on double standard in portrayals of layering in male and female armored characters. 

~Ozzie 

Simplifying the Diablo Ladies, Part 1

We’ve talked about how Diablo makes such an effort to make very disappointing characters. So, it was finally time to take on some of those designs and try to make them less overdone and less….

Anyway, I went for a concept art of the Wizard from Diablo 3. I stayed in the color scheme because I was more distracted by…. everything else that was happening. All the tiny details that only highlighted how little she was wearing… it had to go. I ended up giving her a simple tunic and pants, in order to have some grounded large shapes in the middle of all the small ones. I do like the shoes (below the knee, anyway) and the jacket, so I left them alone.

I did remove some weird-looking accessories, like the not-glove and the awful crown sharps, and I changed her face as I always do.

Definitely a simpler redesign, but it was still not easy to work around all the things that I wanted to keep in the design. I probably should have made her tunic a different color, but it’s still way easier to look at than the original. Hope y’all enjoy!

-Icy

So, at the present moment due to her recent addition to the game – Anna Williams of weird (creepcontent warning: forced stripping as public humilation) misogynistic “these sisters hate each other and publicly humiliate each other kink in my game” fame is one of the “faces” of Tekken 7 right now.  Traditionally her outfits have been cocktail dresses, but this one may be the worse one yet.

Of course, it’s not just this outfit that’s terrible… she has a couple of others which look like really bad Halloween costumes “sexy pirate” and… I don’t even know.

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And just in case that wasn’t horrifying enough – apparently she’s hiding not just throwing knives but a rocket launcher within that outfit.

That is not a joke.

And of course the other one (ie the guy) is Lei, who gets to wear like… comfy street clothes.

– wincenworks

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

Look, I’m not saying that this marketing strategy wouldn’t be effective at getting the attention of twelve year olds… but is this really the best way to market products supposedly suitable for pre- teens?

– wincenworks

This week’s throwback: cover image that totally tells us what the game is about and is very definitely appropriate to tweens. Yup, totally.

Seriously though, while 12-year olds are not too young to begin understanding their own sexuality interest in butts, how about we don’t make them internalize the idea of reducing women to body parts? And maybe consider what kind of message it sends to 12-year old girls? 

~Ozzie 

So a lot of people are talking about many aspects of Apex Legends and there’s a lot of positives – a non-binary character, a character with a same-sex relationship in their background (mentioned immediately), not just one but two playable black women characters… but not enough people are talking about how awesome Bangalore’s outfit is.

This is the default outfit, and it looks every inch her description according to the background fluff the official site provides.

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Interestingly it appears the Bangalore has the opposite of the Creepy Marketing Guy syndrome… the concept art displayed is much more… regular video game.

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This is a trend I would very much like to take off like wildfire.

– wincenworks

Since one of our latest stream redesigns was of some Dark Sword miniatures (including the return of butt-window lizard lady), we considered a couple more characters to fix, including this here Jen – Harvester of Souls, lady necromancer with serious boobplate problem. 

I like me some goth characters with perky attitude (that smile is adorable!), and Jen was actually based on the woman who did this miniature’s paint job, but wow is that costume some generic fantasy garbage, scoring some typical bingo points without hitting a single row. 

Obviously not the worst we’ve seen, just disappointingly uncreative.

~Ozzie