Faking Mr Dark in Rayman Legends
This project consists of a character design based in the Rayman universe as well as the animating of said character and video editing to put the character into a game.
Rayman Origins took the Rayman game series back to 2D platforming (as the first Rayman game was), but while a variant of the old antagonist “Mr Dark” exists in the new game, the actual Mr Dark is not present. Neither was he in the next title, Legends.
This was a soft let down to a lot of Rayman fans, and it drove me to design and animate a Mr Dark for the game and fake his appearance in it. But drawing Mr Dark was not enough for me.
As you can see in the image above (from the original Rayman game), Mr Dark is a cloaked character, and I thought I would make a design of him without the cloak. A Mr Dark Origins, so to speak.
In my personally thought-up lore, Mr Dark was the first “Rayman” - a hero of the Glade of Dreams. He existed long before Rayman was created, and for the longest of time he was just as good and looney as the Rayman we all love. But slowly something began corrupting him, and he slowly turned “Dark” and evil. The above design hopefully reflects this lore.
Next step was to make him live and breathe. I animated him using Spine, and then first gave him a brief cameo in a Let’s Play video to tease him. Quite a few people thought he was the real deal, and I played along for a while. Then I gave him his own video:
While I am not a great actor, it fooled a lot of people - and it was a fun project to do. I enjoy trying to mimic styles and infuse them with my own creativity, and I believe it to be a great way to develop my skills.