Character Designs
My programming brain was fried, so I spent some time this afternoon working on concepts for a companion character, Forky, who assists the player early in the game.
Forky is solving a couple of practical problems for me. The player is explicitly supposed to be the last human employee at the MegaCorp. And as a human driving a forklift (human never pictured), it’s hard for that forklift design to embody emotions on the manual page or promotional illustrations! I was texting an illustrator friend of mine, and we looked at what Pixar had done for a couple of the cars characters. I just decided to try throwing eyes on a forklift as an experiment, and eventually wound up here:
Looks trustworthy
Thematically, I think this design doesn’t work for the player character. As I mentioned, they are specifically not to be a robot. But as an occasional presence, Forky can solve the problems I actually have. They can emote by proxy when warranted and workds much better on the page of the game manual and box art
