The use of shape and color theory in interpreting character traits
Video games are richly ingrained in the world's media culture. Video games are rapidly growing their audience reach through new technological advances and innovative interactive engagement. Characters that create powerful social and emotional connections with players throughout the gameplay are essential for a video game's success. However, character design and interaction principles do not seem to be widely understood within the game development community. This paper analyzes the theory of how people perceive shape and color and then applies these beliefs to personally designed characters that I created. When speaking of shape, I am referring to the actual geometric dimensionality of an object, such as a circle, square, or triangle. When speaking of color, I am referring to the full-color spectrum in an artist's palette, such as blue, indigo, and violet, etc. This study reports the findings of previous research concerning video game character design. It then provides a new research plan for a qualitative study to attempt to design characters that evoke intended emotions with their audience. It also presents a full questionnaire with new unique character designs that will be distributed to the public in the future. The overall goal of this research is to build a better picture of what character designers should include to resonate with their intended audience successfully.