Designing Shotokans

Grab yourself a nice glass of ice-less water, this is gonna be a long one.

What’s a self-respecting “fake” fighting game art project, without some shotokan fighters? The Stars of Standard, Deacons of Default. You’d think they’d be easy to design, and you wouldn’t be completely wrong. But the ones I’ve worked on for a project by Cheezopath, along with generous help from Tibi’s on it, are for a project where we ask “What if Street Fighter had never been made, and something else had come out instead?”.

How do we make characters that “feel” like the real classics, without looking derivative, and maybe could’ve been made back in the day, if things had turned out just slightly differently? Those are some big shoes to fill, even for shotos that are barefoot most of the time.

The Shotos

Creating Kara and Riki

During a group design session, after I drew a few failed-to-not-quite-there-yet designs for the male and female shotos, I made some based on bird aesthetics. Specifically, crows and roosters.

By the way, this bird-themeing would turn out to not just help with locking in not just the feel for these two characters, but also guide the design process of many other ones in this project.

Riki

the Firey Fighting Rooster

I used the rooster for the male fighter, giving him a red spikey faux-hawk for that rooster headcrest look. Then, the complimentary torn yellow gi evokes feathers, comically-enough those of a baby chicken, as well as the yellow of real fighting game characters like Sean from Street Fighter. And as a final cherry on the reference cake, both the red hair and yellow outfit, are Ken’s hair and outfit colors swapped around.

You can still find some more resemblences, with other fighting game characters, such as Yoshitora Tokugawa in Samurai Shodown, with his forward-topknot hairstyle and yellow kimono.

I often even draw him with a small red goatee, for a rooster’s chin-waddle. That might make him look more like Larry Butz from Ace Attorney, than an actual strong fighter, but I just can’t help myself sometimes.

Unsurprisingly, all of these design decisions influnced us for his personality, which is the usual shonen-coded protagonist. Usually either too laid-back or too hot-headed, innately-talented but somewhat-lazy, a bit of a flirt, and loves to brag.

Kara

the serious Martial Crow

While Riki got the bold firey looks and personality of a crow, and evoked other characters like him in fighting games, Kara is isntead the reserved, studious martial arts practitioner, calm and focused. She can appear almost cold to strangers, but is actually very kind. I don’t quite remember which one of the two characters came first, when I started using bird themes, because it really fit both of them so perfectly.

Despite her serious sensibilities, Kara’s design is probably even more ridiculous than Riki’s, when you really take it in. Her entire hairstyle is meant to look like a crow with it’s wings spread downward, and the back of her hair is tied up to look like tail feathers.

The black gi is rather unusual for a protagonist shoto fighter, but not completely unheard of, if you skip forward in time past the early Street Fighter games, and look at character’s like Heihachi Mishima from Tekken, or Yuki Akira’s black outfit in Virtua Fighter. In Street Fighter, of course, black gis are usually reserved for villainous characters, like Evil Ryu or Akuma/Gouki.

And unlike Ken or Ryu, Kara’s gi is lot less torn-up in most of my drawings of her.

Riki & Kara as Kids

The Proto-Shotokan kiddo

These shotos are meant to be alternate universe counterparts, with their earliest versions being identical child fighters that both used the same sprites, with some color-palette-swapping to change their outfit colors.

The 'kid', with placeholder colors to be swapped later for each shoto. Don’t laugh at my colors, I have the strength and fighting spirit of two children!!

When I later looked at all the playable characters in Data East’s “Fighter’s History” franchise, I was amazed at how much their Ryoko Kano girl fit the vibe I was looking for. Unfortunately, our own plucky karate kid’s design called for a more… Street Fighter 1 level of quality.

Conclusion

Since Kara and Riki are the main characters of this project, their drawings will also make for good reference when making other fighters, and designing stages that would work in fighting games.

References

A random assortment of the various things I stuffed my head with, to create Kara and Riki. Includes a bunch of moodsetting music for each one, too!

Riki References

Music

Kara References

Music

Carré