Isla, is best buddies with two other girls; Lilly and Jazmyn. These girls live in Forge City and like to enter the bi-monthly mecha battles with whatever scraps they've collected to rebuild Sinclair, their battle-bot. Isla takes on the role of pilot, she's the youngest and has the reflexes and aggressive nature to handle it.
She has skills in DIY robotic engineering, her interests are mechanics and hero comics.
She's sassy, highly energetic, 1.25m tall, and likes her vast collection of hair bows which she is very protective of.
She's very expressive in her face and gestures.
Before I design a character, I write about him/her including their place in the story(game). Once I have all the characters and their plots I write the dialog - how they interact and drive the story. From this their character grows, little nuances, habits, likes and dislikes form.
Then, a character design concept is created!
[A big thanks to Aaron Alexovich for the character designs]
A voice needs to be found. And that usually requires finding a good voice actor. Someone like, G.K Bowes
Then model and rigging. A high resolution version is created first (in ZBrush below) then the mesh is decimated into a more game friendly lower poly version. Face shape blend targets and body rig is completed (in Blender below). This is where it is nice to have the dialog and voice over to reference. Gives an idea of how the character will express while talking.
Then textured and ready to animate for the cut scenes and in-game stuff. For this game, the characters don't require much in the way of texturing, mostly just a colour and a some ambient occlusion shadowing.
After some tweaks and adjustments, and a lot of animation testing in game, she can go about her business piloting giant robots and getting into mischief.
And I can move onto the next character!