Mephistopheles’ Sprite: Reinterpreting a Familiar Character

by Meagan

Mephistopheles and four of her expressions

The Faust legend, and thus the character of Mephistopheles, has been around for centuries – Goethe wasn’t even the first to write about it.  So my challenge in designing Meph’s sprite was this:  How do you take a character that has been reimagined countless times over hundreds of years and really make it your own?  While I’m not sure I can answer that question definitively, I’d like to share a little of the thought process I went through in creating Mephistopheles for Faust: Scene II. 

Preliminary Research:

Source

My first step was to pull up my preferred search engine and do some visual research.  If you want to make something a little different from what’s already out there, you have to know what’s already out there, right?  Look at what others have done.  Think about what works and what doesn’t, what you might want to pay homage to, what you want to deviate from.  (It was at this step that I found out it’s actually not uncommon for Meph to be played by a woman in modern performances of Faust.  Pretty cool.)

Next, I consulted my source material.  The first thing Meph does when she shows up in this scene is describe what she’s wearing, so clearly I had some imperatives when designing her outfit.  I needed to include at least gold braid, a sword, and some kind of hat with a feather in it, and red should be the predominating color.  From here, I had some decisions to make about the costume’s style.

Period Costume, But Not Really:

Source

While vaguely medieval in setting, the Faust legend draws on sources from several different time periods.  I wanted to reflect this in Meph’s outfit, so I researched historical clothing from the 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th centuries.  Most of the designs I found, however, I felt were way too impractical for her character - especially the women’s clothing!  I settled instead on a RenFaire- ish look for its theatricality and visual appeal, taking some cues from rapier fencing costumes.  This would allow her to move around a lot, theoretically (I imagine her as a very animated person), and help the sword make more sense.

Designing a Demon:

Source

I wanted Meph to be a recognizably feminine and maybe even somewhat pretty humanoid, but with something a little “off” about her.  So keeping with the medieval theme, I looked to some medieval and Renaissance artwork depicting demons for ideas.  Temptation of St. Anthony paintings were really useful for this.  It surprised me how often demons are shown as these reptilian or even frog-like creatures.  Playing off of that, I gave Meph’s skin a greenish cast with sharp highlights for a subtle slimy look.  I’m also really in love with the classic goat-like concept of a demon – horns, cloven hooves, and such.  Given that Meph’s wearing a large hat and you only see her from mid-thigh up, though, none of the typical features would be visible.  My solution was to give her goat-like ears.  I sketched out a couple options, since goat ears are actually pretty varied. 

An awful photo of my sketchbook taken with my phone.

I got really attached to the big floppy ones at first.  They were really different from the usual depictions of goat-like demons.  However, I was worried they’d take away from her face too much.  The faces on both sprites needed to be highly visible to show the changing expressions clearly.  For this reason, I went with the smaller, pointy ears.

The Final Result:

The finished sprite in-game.

In the end, my hope is that all this piecing together of ideas and elements from different sources will result in something fresh.  Meph was actually my first attempt at a VN character sprite, so definitely a learning experience.  I'll be writing more about my sprite art soon.  I've got a couple of digital painting posts in the works that will break down my steps for actually drawing the sprite.

From character design to sprite: Personal projects

by Aviala

Last time I wrote about my character design and sprite process when working with clients but when I do work for my own projects, I'm my own boss and the way I work is different.

With my own character, I usually start with a broad idea about the character's personality. It would be better to have all the details down but I'm usually really excited about drawing the characters so I start drawing before I finish writing the backstory, etc.

Based on the basic personality and the fashion style I've established for the world the characters live in, I start sketching, usually with a pencil.

For Aifao, the character above, I knew that he was a 25-year guy who's a soldier. These are some of the first sketches for him. In Skyfish, it's very common for guys to have long hair, so I decided it was suitable. You can't see it from the sketch, but since he's related to Captain, who's a brunette, he also has dark brown hair.

After the initial sketches, I start working on the sprite. At this point I usually don't have a clear idea of what the character will wear. I start by drawing the character nude, and sketch clothes on top on different layers, like a paper doll. I often look at references for the poses. I usually leave the sprites rougher under the clothes and only spend time on refining the visible parts.

I try out different base colours for the clothes by drawing them on different layers and fiddling with the hue, saturation, etc. The design above might not be the final one, but I had a feeling that she needed a long skirt. She's also not very rich, so the colours aren't very bright for the most part, and her outfit is clean yet simple.

The "professional" way to do everything would be to do separate character and outfit designs properly, and draw separate sprites based on them. But because I'm in charge of my own project and this method seems to work for me, this is the way I work.

Charon here is from a wealthy family so his clothes have brighter shades like blue, and he has some embroidered details on his hat. 

And last but not least: When I need to design new outfits, I hide most of the layers and just doodle on top with different colours. I don't know why, but this method has produced some of my favourite outfit designs. The key thing is probably that they're really fast to draw on top of the naked sprites so if something doesn't work it doesn't take long to come up with something new.

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.

All-Female Faust: Gendering Goethe

By Meagan

For about a year now, I’ve been working on Faust: Scene II - a kinetic novel adaptation of an excerpt from Goethe’s classic tragedy.  The dialogue in this personal project of mine is nearly unaltered from a contemporary English translation.    The art is heavily inspired by historical artists such as Heironymous Bosch and Harry Clarke.  The element that I feel is entirely mine, however, is the gender presentation of the two main characters.

Making Faust and Mephistopheles women wasn’t an arbitrary decision.  In fact, I wavered back and forth for a long time about how “true” I should stay to the source material in this regard.  Ultimately, though, I chose to make Faust: Scene II a story about women.

In the Western literary canon, women and other marginalized groups are rarely represented in important roles - yet we’re told that these works are somehow universal and speak to the essence of what it is to be human.  Faust the character, especially, is often read as a metaphor for humanity as a whole, and his existential struggles represent humanity’s collective grappling with morality and scientific progress.  Changing the characters’ gender is my way of questioning the supposed universality of the (straight, white) male experience.  I want to challenge players to read these same broad philosophical themes in a female character, rather than in the men we’re erroneously told depict the “default human.”

What’s more is that Faust: Scene II is an opportunity for me to portray an older female character.  Women over 35 are a rarity not just in games, but in all forms of mass media, and scarcely (if ever) do they get to play the role of protagonist.  Their roles tend to be limited to passive, grandmotherly figure or evil witch stereotypes.  Faust, in sharp contrast, is not only an active and driven protagonist in my kinetic novel; she’s also a university professor and renowned scientist.  Simply put, by changing Faust’s gender, I hope to expand what we think of as “appropriate” roles for older women.  As a woman myself, I want to know that I’ll still have options in life 10, 20, or 30 years from now.

All this being said, I don’t have any illusions that my 5-minute Ren’Py game is going to totally change the world.  However, if it gets a few players to think about the gender representation issues I’ve talked about here, I’ll consider it a success.  Faust: Scene II is nearly complete with only a couple art assets to finish up.  Expect plenty more updates from me related to this project!