Evo-Nauts: designing a toyline
The Evo-Nauts were an experiment in attempts to create a toy line of buildable action figures with unique looks, but cohesive enough to look like they go together.
With them being buildable figures, you can either follow the instructions or be creative and make your own Evo-Naut
The Early ideations of the Evo-Nauts revoled around 5 basic color coded robots built to perform a simple task. Before i started to design the individual figures, I wanted to figure out what exactly the guidelines would be.
I used a complimentary color scheme for each of them, with most of the body being 1-2 colors and their 'power core' and their eyes being the complimentary. I also used an alternating light and dark grey for mechanical parts like the ball sockets and bolts.
First flushed out concepts for the characters
Goals for character design
- distinct head sculpts to distinguish who's who
-2 pairs of arms and legs with matching colors to save money on manufacturing unique parts (a pair of big arms, big legs, small arms and small legs) and using unique combinations of the different pairs to create unique proportions and silhouettes.
- unique weapons to identify the character's carrer before becoming an Evo-naut (did not figure out the name for them at this time)
- unique extra part to further push unique proportions and silhouettes.
What Stayed?
- kept the unique head sculpts and alternating limb size
-kept the unique weapons
What changed?
- head sculpts not final, just throwing out a concept before next steps
-removing extra part, adding more sculpts to be made, we can have a lower number of sculpts to start and release more things in later waves of Evo-Nauts
- not having the chest piece be reversible because it would be complicated to model and have it work both ways
-one uniform blaster size
-no alien text on body-- keeping print job to a minimum for cost effectiveness
Concepts for the character head sculpts.
I wanted the shape and color blocking to be unique for each robot so even in greyscale the faces are different.
More detailed turnarounds of the chestplate and limbs
I wanted to make the smaller and the larger look different enough without going too different- characters with big and small limbs need to look cohesive.
The larger limbs i planned to make it feel more like a heavy armor and even took inpsiration from football shoulderpads- the overlapping and large chunky shape design led me to this point.
Also, I designed the larger limbs to have more pin holes for accessories to attach to. Larger limbs imply more strength so it makes sense more things can be attached to them.
Experimenting with titles
I wanted the color scheme to be bright and neon, immedately catching kid's eyes to want to buy it.
I was also figuring out the name too, based off the story. The story was that robots were sent to colonize an alien planet for their creators but became sentient and evolved into larger and more individual robotic entities
I feel Evo-Nauts said that without it being too dependant on the story to sound cool.
Here's the final lineup of the characters in an action pose and amock up for what the packaging would look like. Overall, Im pretty happy with how it all looks, it feels very cohesive.
