Any tips for weapon/armor design, Dan? Aside from my current strategy of "plagiarize all the video games"?
I think biggest thing to avoid is OVER DESIGN.
Don't make every little element of the armor or weapon a symbol of this or that with three pages of associated lore and backstory tie ins, etc. Not every event in the character's life has to be manifested in their costume -- a costume shouldn't be a photo album and lore dump. They don't have to be wearing the pendant their dead sister gave 'em, wielding a sword destined to destroy an ancient evil with a magic inscription left by the qt DFC elf sorcess waifu they saved from the frozen mountain goblins, wearing the boots of their dead father who was once a hero of the kingdom who was betrayed by his men, etc.
A character's appearance should be tied to the world, yes, but the goal is to stimulate the viewer's imagination, not send 'em diving into the lore index. First arouse interest, stimulate the imagination, be aesthetically pleasing, be consistent with the world, THEN lore stuff. And keep it simple, clean, and restrained (if that's the look you're going for, of course).
Hrmm.
And yeah, don't plagiarize. You can learn the techniques and lift design details when they help you of course.... but first get the vision of your world clear in your head. Think about how your character fits into that world, and then think about how they acquired their amour, what it's meant to protect against, what kind of wear and tear and repair it's seen, what kind of aesthetic tradition that armor might have been developed in, etc. Of course, you can bounce back and forth between designing your armor and designing your world. But the point is that if you design the armor in isolation, you might get armor that "looks cool", but doesn't really doesn't contribute much else.
Don't make every little element of the armor or weapon a symbol of this or that with three pages of associated lore and backstory tie ins, etc. Not every event in the character's life has to be manifested in their costume -- a costume shouldn't be a photo album and lore dump. They don't have to be wearing the pendant their dead sister gave 'em, wielding a sword destined to destroy an ancient evil with a magic inscription left by the qt DFC elf sorcess waifu they saved from the frozen mountain goblins, wearing the boots of their dead father who was once a hero of the kingdom who was betrayed by his men, etc.
A character's appearance should be tied to the world, yes, but the goal is to stimulate the viewer's imagination, not send 'em diving into the lore index. First arouse interest, stimulate the imagination, be aesthetically pleasing, be consistent with the world, THEN lore stuff. And keep it simple, clean, and restrained (if that's the look you're going for, of course).
Hrmm.
And yeah, don't plagiarize. You can learn the techniques and lift design details when they help you of course.... but first get the vision of your world clear in your head. Think about how your character fits into that world, and then think about how they acquired their amour, what it's meant to protect against, what kind of wear and tear and repair it's seen, what kind of aesthetic tradition that armor might have been developed in, etc. Of course, you can bounce back and forth between designing your armor and designing your world. But the point is that if you design the armor in isolation, you might get armor that "looks cool", but doesn't really doesn't contribute much else.
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