When I came on board Privateer Press as the art director in June of 2012, one of the first tasks Creative Director Ed Bourelle gave me was to develop a look for an elite group of near-future Special Forces soldiers for LEVEL 7 [OMEGA PROTOCOL].

After gathering all the associated inspiration material, I recruited artist Adrian Majkrzak to handle the concept design. Instead of designing these soldiers individually, we designed them side by side to ensure uniformity in their design. Typically in the concept phase I try not to cramp the concept artists’ style and allow them to present the figures however they so choose. I firmly believe the most important part of the initial phase of character design is making sure the figure has a unique, identifiable silhouette so they can be identified quickly from a distance. In miniature design this is even more important, as they need to be striking at small scale.

With Disco Team we had the unique challenge of designing the figures to be fairly streamlined and combat ready while still generating a unique silhouette for each one. For Adrian’s first pass I had initially requested a more modern level of tech, and I prepared my feedback along those lines. This pass is on top, and my quick sketch revisions are on the bottom. I passed these to Matt Wilson for his feedback, and he requested a higher tech level; the overall feel for each character, however, was spot on, and we needed to maintain that.

Knowing we were going back to the drawing board, I requested Adrian provide some silhouettes to save time on basic design. After he submitted nine silhouettes for us to choose from, we selected silhouettes 2A, 1B, 1C, 1D, and 1E. I then did some quick work over the top of those silhouettes to indicate a few different light sources that would help break up the silhouettes a bit on the Team Leader and the Rifleman.

The next pass establishes all the major shapes of the armor. Here you’ll see the armor details have been roughed in, and in the middle and bottom rows you’ll notice I’ve adjusted the silhouettes a bit to break up shapes, adding extra details like radio antennae and doing quick color tests with the lighting on their gear. Because these figures are so dark, I felt it was important to have some light spots on them to tone down the grim dark a bit. In the real world we use red and green lighting at night, as the wavelength of the light doesn’t allow it to travel very far, and this helps maintain stealth. In games, however, red is typically a bad guy color, so that was nixed fairly quickly. We opted for a cool blue, as it’s a bit more of a friendly/hero color.

Once we had all our major design elements taken care of, I made a few more adjustments before sending the image back to Adrian. See if you can spot all of the additions, subtractions, and changes! At this point, all of the major details had been established, so it was only a matter of Adrian rendering out all of the smaller details. There were also a few other changes to make them final:

• Battle dress uniform changed from black to a dark olive drab so that they weren’t entirely grey (it’s a very subtle detail, but it does make a bit of a difference in their presentation)
• Ranks added to each of the team member’s helmets, chest protectors, and shoulder pads
• Blood type added to pieces of armor
• Grenade types colorized and grenades added to the heavies’ chest protector
• Technical readout added to the forearm-mounted drone control device on the Rifleman.
• Ranks subdued so they look painted on

The last detail to be completed was the design of the backpack drone and then they needed to be given names. Saving the drone for another discussion, I present to you, in order of appearance from left to right: Sergeant James DeGroot, Corporal Thomas Miller, Major Joseph Hernandez, Sergeant Simon Patel, and Lieutenant Robert Williams. Now, what are you waiting for? Join Disco Team and execute Omega Protocol!