Animal Buddies

Creating the RPG system is a headache-inducing endeavor to me, so I usually do coding in the mornings and other design stuff in the afternoon, such as levels or... characters! So I made two new characters in the meantime. The avian scribe Momo, and the fuzzy mouse Mhys!

Click 'Read more' to read more about these characters!

Forest Fever

I've been designing and building forest levels recently, so I've been thinking about what kind of characters you would actually recruit in the forest. The obvious one is to immediately jump to animals. I already have an animal character, too: Fenrys. He sort of set the standard for these anthropomorphized animals: a human build with animal legs, hands and face.

I got the idea for Momo from a friend who really, really likes pigeons. Usually, bird characters are sort of majestic: owls, falcons, eagles, etc. A pigeon is far from majestic, which I thought was a nice difference. It also led into her character: an insecure scribe who is curious about the world around her, and grows into an unlikely hero.

Her color scheme does need some work, though. The different grays make her a little blurred out, so I should add more blues to make the different parts of her body more easily distinguishable.

Mhys was directly inspired from a level I designed. In the level, the player can enter a house made out of a mushroom, and my mind immediately wandered to who would be living in that lil' mush. For some reason, I came up with a mouse.

The levels take place within a fantasy world created by Viola herself. I imagined all the characters in the world would actually come from other worlds, so Mhys is technically the first inhabitant of "Viola's World". Thus, I made his design very similar to Viola herself: big scarf and a red coat. It was fun to think of a character that's smaller than Viola herself, too. Mhys is a sort of guide for the early levels, a chipper fellow with a penchant of trusting strangers a little too quickly.

Even though I like the idea of the character, I'm not too sold on the actual design. He doesn't really feel like a party member, but more like an actual nameless NPC. At the same time, that's also sort of the idea behind Viola... But I could still add a little extra.