FMP ~ Characters + expressions

Characters:

In this section I will go through and explain my process for the character design of Lilith, Eve and Naomi for my FMP project.

Firstly after E1, I went back and reworked the lineart of my 3 characters Working in Procreate, I made sure to work on a screen size 1920×1080 canvas, as that is the size I needed them to be to correctly import into Renpy. I made the lines smoother and added some more small details. Making sure to use the same brush and line weight for them all, as I hadn’t done that originally. Also, I decided to leave drawing the faces till later, as I was going to create multiple facial expressions and I wanted to do these all at the same time.

I made a new moodboard on pureref, compiling images of visual novel sprites from games that I found on https://www.spriters-resource.com/. This is a great resource for finding any game asset. I was particularly inspired by the sprite styles of Danganronpa and the Persona series with clean, thin line art. Also sprites from steins;gate and ypur turn to die, as they also have this clean line art, mixed with a lot of overlay texture. As I also was making my characters have a ‘hallucination’ version, the your turn to die sprites looked really cool with the face and filter/ texture over the characters changing to show them in a more scary way.

Below shows my process for rendering the characters, using Eve as an example: I had advice from my tutor to create a greyscale render of the characters first, then add the colour, enabling me to try out different colour combinations for them. So the first image is the character with only greyscale colour – and hair rendering. I did this first since I wanted to give the hair a more realistic and 3 dimensional look – because this is my style preferance and I think it looks nicer, whereas some of my reference images had quite a flat look to the hair. Then I added some greyscale shading with a softer round brush, and then the colour with a colour overlay.

For Eve, I also used this orange plastic texture image that I found on pinterest, to use as an overlay on her clipboard as it looked flat before and I wanted it to look more realistic. Next, I added overlay layers of these textured procreate brushes with low opacity – tarkine for the fabric texture on the clothing, and grunge for the hair. These made the characters look much less flat, and also made the skin stand out as seperate from the clothes/ hair. Lastly, I added the white theatre lighting to the side of the character and the highlights on the clothes and hair. I wanted Eves dress/ gloves to give the impression of a shiny latex type material, whereas the other characters have more cotton fabric clothing.

This is the final rendering for Eve without her face added. Initially, I had all the character completed without the textured overlay on them, and I am very glad I added this as it is a lot more visually interesting.

• Eve holds a clipboard and pen expressing her senior position and a need to keep the hospital in order. The red in her colour palette symbolises both authority and danger – as Lilith perceives her to be a significant threat.

Below is the same process for the other characters, the greyscale base, shading, colour, overlay and highlight.

• Lilith’s primary colour of baby pink represents innocence – she is innocent to her own mind and is trying her best to recover from the past. Her four leaf clover hair accessory also shows her wariness and hope for success.

• Naomi’s yellow and golden colour palette represents her joyous personality and optimistic attitude

Hallucination character versions:

After the normal character sprite designs were complete, I was deciding how I could present the hallucination versions of the characters. I referred back to my sprite moodboard and tested out some ways similar to the your turn to die spites where there is a dark red filter over the characters to pressent them in a horror way – also I had inspiration from visual novel doki doki literature club (https://www.spriters-resource.com/pc_computer/dokidokiliteratureclub/), as they use a similar method. I found it really cool and just a good idea that these visual novels utilise in being able to show horror in the static images whilst using the original character sprites.

Below are the experimentations for the hallucination character versions, without the faces as I decided to add those later when I worked on all of the characters expressions.

I decided on these versions using a red overlay with the noise brush and a hard mix blending mode, as they looked the most ominous/ threatening. Also i wanted them to be able to stand out in contrast to the background which woule be quite light – so the dark character over a light background would create more unease.

The full normal and hallucination character variations with the faces will be shown in the next post!

Expressions:

After the character designs were all finished, I moved onto creating the facial expressions and expression sheets for the characters. As per my statement of intent, I reduced the amount of assets I had to make for my game due to time and wanted them to be of better quality – so I worked from this new amended asset list, to keep track of all of the assets I had to complete.

Before starting the expressions, I created a new section on my pinterest board to gather inspirations for a wide range of facial expressions. I also took inspiration from the faces featured in the series Higurashi when they cry – which is also a psychological horror anime and visual novel, featuring characters in altered mental spaces and hallucinations. I wanted my expressions to also be quite exaggerated, as some where hallucinations and meant to seem overly dramtic/ scary – as per my story.

Eve and Naomi also have more expressions than Lilith, as the visual novel is presented through Liliths eyes and narrated by her, with some scenes only featuring the secondary characters on screen – like when she is feeling they are judging/ threatening her. However, Lilith didn’t need these mean faces.

All of the characters also required a ‘scary hallucination’ face, which was to be added to their hallucination version of the sprite mentioned earlier. This character form/ iteration shows when we are viewing the story through Liliths eyes and her mental state is the most degraded – she sees her colleagues as monsters and herself as her other aggressive persoanlity.

I drew all of the expressions on top of a base of the existing character face in procreate – to create an expression sheet for each character. Then I added the faces onto the full characters and the sprite versions (that were cropped and resized to fit correctly into Renpy).

Below is the expression sheet for Eve! She required 8 expressions: neutral, talking, happy, angry, scared/ crying (which I made 2 versions of – one with and without tears), the scary hallucination face, and 2 ‘crazy’ looking expressions. As per the story, I gave her an angry face and Naomi a concerned face. As the catalyst for certain events in the story is Eve getting angry and scolding Lilith, whilst Naomi looks on concerned and feeling bad for Lilith. I also took into account the character personalities with the expressions. For example, Naomi’s personality is happy/ outgoing, so her happy expression is more expressive than Eve and Lilith, who are shown to have a more mildly happy face in comparison.

The hallucination and crazy expressions, are all what Lilith perceives when she is not in the right state of mind – thus them being quite exaggerated and unrealistic.

Below is the expression sheet for Naomi! With the same requirements as Eve, just the concerned face instead of angry.

Below is the expression sheet for Lilith! She required less expressions – being neutral, talking, happy, sad/ crying, crazy and the scary hallucination version.

The next post will show all of the completed characters and sprites!