This is the second and final concept I designed while mentoring with the incredibly talented Lars Sowig, using techniques applied and learned through his awesome Learn Squared course. I’d always wanted to design my own form of care package and thought the idea of a laser guided nesting system that takes the inner contents via a shell core, behind enemy lines, while being dropped from high altitude would be interesting. Thoughts of origami and transformation were always in the back of my head. Ideally this is something that would be earned as a lower tier killstreak, dropped from some sort of stealth plane.
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From the get-go I knew I wanted to design some form of staged care package with a good degree of visual layering and nesting in regards to the inner contents. These initial ideation sketches allowed me to formulate how I wanted to communicate this idea.
You can see I felt like the top left sketch had the most promise, this is ultimately the general idea I went with to the finish. I liked the bottom right as well, however while functional, there proved to be far less opportunity to design in nearly as much transformation or layering.
These development sketches illustrate the initial look and feel I had in mind. In the beginning this was designed to feel and look more heavy and boxy than the final product. This is intentional as I wanted the player to associate the design of the prop with still being a care package rather than a missile or weapon.
These photobash mockups allowed me to get a better idea of what my final design could potentially look like. While I didn’t take all the features to my final this proved to be useful in finding what I needed to communicate and what was ultimately redundant/subtractive.
At this point I began blocking in 3D and really defining the shapes outside of photoshop and making sure things still played well together. This allows me to see the design from any angle I want on the fly which speeds up my workflow.
Lastly, as always, I wanted to create some world building and storytelling decals to give my prop some life. For me this typically pushes things the last 10% which helps things ultimately get sold and just feel way more cool.