Character Design for Card Games: Bringing Personality to a Tiny Surface

I have a challenge for you, and I ask you to play along.

In your mind, remember Scooby Doo.

Great, now here’s another: Bugs Bunny.

Spider-Man.

Easy, huh?  And if I were to ask you to describe them, that’d be easy, too.

Your description of any of those characters would very likely include something other than their physical appearance. Maybe you’d do a classic Scooby laugh, or mention Spidey’s witty repartee.

As viewers, we put ourselves in the story, identifying with the characters and parts of their personalities that are most like ours. We are all sometimes goofy like Scooby or sarcastic like Bugs. Characters help us visualize how we’d act if we were in the story.

As I’m developing the characters for my game Fowl Deeds, I need to understand the personality of the characters I’m creating. In this case, they’re a bunch of mean, bullying chickens, so identifying what characterizes “mean” and “bully” becomes the first step in building out the character designs.

Defining what your character looks like becomes much easier when you know all they want to do is poke your eyes out and terrorize the ducks in the farmyard.

Sketching a Character Design

Creating a character doesn’t start with sketches or doodles, it starts with taking that short list of personality quirks and finding ways to visually represent them. 

For example, Scooby is a Great Dane that hangs out with a perpetually high dude named Shaggy in a kinda creepy 70’s van. At heart, he might be a coward, but he’s the light-hearted, kinda clumsy goofball you would love to have around.

Scooby Doo’s bow-legged stance and expressively goofy posture emphasizes his lack of grace. His eyes are huge and expressive, the hallmark of Disney-styled characters. These touches are what give us a short-hand way to understand what we should expect from the character.

Visualizing the personality is tricky, but when done successfully, we instantly understand who it is we are looking at. Disney does this well with their villains, who always seem to exude malevolence and evil while still remaining in a fun cartoon world.

Developing the Character’s Design

Once you’ve taken the personality quirks and settled on a basic look, you have to understand every flex and limitation of the character as they move, taking in mind what their expressions and movements say about who they are. This takes many, many sketches and drawings to test your understanding of every angle from which the character can be seen.

This part is often the most fun, because it is all about exploration, trying new ideas, and finding the edges of possibility of a character. But at its core, this part is about setting a foundation in your imagination of the character itself.

For example, I needed to understand how chicken beaks in a cartoon setting worked. Literally, how they came together, could flex, where teeth and tongues hide, everything. To accomplish this, I got out some Sculpey and sketched in three dimensions the beak and head of my chickens.

It took a lot of work for me to be able to take that chicken beak from evil, leering grin to full-throated howl of fury. It took time to understand the upper beak didn’t move and the lower beak is where all the action is at.

Simplifying the shapes that define the body parts and deciding how far is too far to stretch them, even in a cartoon-ish setting, is a lot of fun to explore. Can a chicken’s mouth really stretch to three times its height? Sure, you just need a very tall coop.

How Do You Know You’ve Won in Character Design?

In the end, the success of your character is measured by how the audience responds to, and recognizes, the character’s personality. It’s not all about making them look perfect, it is about whether or not they deliver the relatable emotion and reaction to situations that makes us love characters.

My Fowl Deeds chickens are mischievous, and a little mean, because the game’s story has them pecking and plucking each other to death. I needed them to express a lot of emotion very clearly, and it turned out their beaks were the perfect way to do this. 

A character isn’t finished when it looks right. It’s finished when it reacts right.

In animation, you get motion and sound. In a card game, you get a frozen moment. You don’t get a second frame to make things more clear. That means each pose I’m drawing has to do all the talking. If one glance tells you who’s about to peck, who’s about to pluck, and who’s about to duck — then the character is doing its job.