This project is a part of my third year university Game Project. My team is creating a narrative-focused, psychological horror game wherein you play as a university student who discovers they are being stalked by a malicious Fae. I was tasked with creating a concept for the Fae, which I then went on to model.

I began with a few rough silhouettes to explore which shape language I felt conveyed the right feeling of malevolence, and then choose a few to carry through into a rough sketch.

I enjoyed the skeletal nature of all three, but the triangular shape language of the central sketch made a powerful and imposing figure, particularly with the exaggerated shapes of the horns, and so I choose this one to continue to work with and improve.

To improve upon the sketch I began by going back to the silhouette and greatly exaggerating the triangular shapes of its body for a clear first read. Many of the changes to each iteration were quite minor; raising the height of the hips to exaggerate the unnatural proportions of the legs, exaggerating the length of the arms, and streamlining the torso to create a more triangular shape and a thinner waist. I experimented with adding wings but ultimately decided that they added too much noise to the silhouette and would take away from the first read of the Fae when the player views it in-game. The final step was to adjust the size of the head and horns to create a focal point for the figure. The final iteration is on the right.

After this stage, I began to render in details. I wanted to keep the skeletal features I had used before, so I kept the protruding ribs. I also decided to attempt to make the face unnerving.  In the lore we had researched for making the game, the Fae were often referenced as having glowing green eyes. To add a twist to that I settled on only having the mouth visible and the eyes covered with a mask. To replace the eyes, I made the orb above the head glow green. For the rough three quarter view, I went into ZBrush and did a quick concept sculpt from the front orthographic, which I was able to rotate and screenshot, then draw over for the line art.

Although this was my final concept, after discussions with my team we decided that the Fae would have a natural tree like texture, and twigs and moss protruding from it's body and horns. My teammate, Adele Richards, did a quick mock-up of the alterations; shown below.