From character design to sprite: With clients

by Aviala

This is the first part of my character design and sprite process series.

When I work with clients, there are a few things I need to keep in mind when I start doing the designs. I make certain assumptions about the preferred style and "feel" of the characters based on the genre, and of course, the client's requests. For example, for an otome game I'd probably choose a cuter, more manga-inspired style, and for a grim story about WW2 I'd choose a painted, semirealistic style with darker colours - unless the client asked for something else.

Based on the client's description about the character, I do a very rough sketch. At that point it doesn't have colours or anything. Sometimes I do a couple of different outfit sketches.

Then, after I make changes to the sketch based on the client's request, I block in base colours. At this stage I ask the client to tell me if any final changes need to be made because it's hard to change things when the sprite is done. I usually sketch with light colours on a warm grey background because pure white is very overpowering and makes it hard to see lighter shades like the light yellow I'm using below.

After the client is okay with the colours, I either start doing the lineart or painting. Here I'm using a sprite from Our Healing Hearts as an example. The client preferred a painted anime-style look, so I skipped the lineart stage. I'm painting the clothes, hair, eyes, mouth, etc all on different layers so I can change things (like colours or details) easily if I have to.

After doing a rough painting I usually show the design to the client once again. At this stage I don't usually make any changes to the design unless I really have to, Usually this is the point where I decide the character design is done, but with Our Healing Hearts the pose happened to be suitable for the sprite, so instead of starting from the sketching stage again, I just started turning the design into a sprite.

Above is the almost finished sprite. It needs some finishing touches but it's very close to being ready for the game, Since the pose of the arms in the design was a bit unnatural I drew the hands again based on the client's request. I also drew a wheelchair for the character. I chose to draw the whole wheelchair instead of just drawing the visible parts so that I could get the structure and perspective right.

Stay tuned for next time where I'll write about designing characters for my own games.