Character design update

I made some concept art for Wilderplace’s main character today to get a sense for how she’ll look in the final game.

The in-game artwork will be closer to the small silhouettes, but it’s helpful to first make a detailed drawing, and use that to inform the scaled down design. I haven’t decided how I want to use the detailed drawings in the game, but I’d like to use them.

I love the way these drawings look when coerced down to 4 colors, and with decreased resolution. I might stick with that aesthetic for the final game.

Here are some earlier sketches of the character, roughly in chronological order. You can see how the design gradually moves towards what I have today.

Originally, she wasn’t a she, and she didn’t have a staff. The concept for the game was different:

To fit the gameplay concepts I had been exploring, I added a staff and started thinking of the character as a human instead of a ghost:

I still need to give the deity, the spirits, and the animals the same level of character design attention.

In other news, here’s a gif of the game as it stands today. Just finished adding a basic dialogue system and increased the level count from 1 to 4. Still a lot of work to do but momentum is good.

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