Designing my weapon asset

After completing my 100 silhouettes i needed to fully concept a weapon into a asset that my character could use. This means that making the gun appearance to both fit the time period, style and look as if it could be real is important. Due to my timelimit i don't want to spend to much time focusing and refining lots of silhouettes like i did for my character so i am only going to choose one weapon to refine. Luckily there was one design that i thought looked better than the rest which caught my eye, the design was small but looked like to could be powerful which related to the type of character i want to make.

When designing weapons is important not to copy other designs and also to keep within the style and time period of the game, as my game is based in the future, weapons would be more technologic advanced. Its also important to keep the iconic view of the weapon you are creating so that when a player picks up the weapon by the look of it they have a clue of what type it is.

Other games that have good future weapons and have done well in designs for purpose are games like Halo, Mass Effect, Time splitters, Unreal tournament. Some games weapons get extremely popular and then always compared to other weapons in other games. The Halo 'assault rifle' was extremely popular and dispite it not being in the 2nd game it was brought it back for the 3rd game due to popular demand from the fans.

series of game weapons similar to what i want to create:

Halo 'assault rifle'

http://images.mocpages.com/user_images/16128/12434247271_SPLASH.jpg

Mass Effect Rifle

http://gadgetsin.com/uploads/2011/01/mass_effect_2_m8_avenger_assault_rifle_paper_craft_1.jpg

The weapon i want to design to me feels more like it could be a shotgun, so i want to look at the shape and understand the look of a shotgun today.

AA-12 one of the most modern shotguns today.