New Characters!

I made these two new characters a few weeks ago, but I just haven't made a blogpost about the two of them. On the left is the futuristic robot "Arti", and on the right is the sun-worshipping knight "Soleil"!

Find out more about them and their creation process by clicking 'Read more'.

Future Pianist Arti

To put it mildly, I absolutely love robot characters. An artificially created machine learning what it's like to be human, or already possessing human qualities is one of my favorite character tropes. So obviously, this game full of things I love needs a robot character. Arti's character arc is all about finding out what it means to 'create': in his case, how playing music might make him as human as anyone else. I didn't draw it (yet), but his chest folds out to show a tiny piano with tiny arms.

At first I wanted to make him more humanoid, like a cyborg or android character. The more I thought about it, though, the more it didn't feel right for Viola's setting. Most of it is quirky fantasy, and derpy robots are a better fit for that than futuristic androids. The name "Arti" is obviously short for "Artificial"!

So a lot of reference material in Arti's concept is derpy robots. Robo from Chrono Trigger, the Iron Giant and Blitzcrank from League of Legends. I've also borrowed the singular headlight from Mass Effect's Geth to function as an 'eye', with a singular brow to use for emotes and avatars. His color scheme is still undecided. 

Mega Man, Robo/Blitzcrank, purple, and a black piano color.

Concept and reference images.

Sun Knight Soleil

A trope that has gotten more popular in recent years is the 'sun knight', a knight worshipping the sun or a sun god. Solaire from Dark Souls is an obvious one: helpful to the player, if a bit of a weirdo. I wanted to have a motherly character for Viola, as a figure to look up to. So, I created the female knight, Soleil.

Soleil basically went right in almost one go when it came to designing her. Bright armor, dark skin, light hair, tall, beefy, strong and obviously friendly. Somewhere along the way, it started feeling right to me that Soleil is a trans woman who chose the name 'Soleil' for herself in service to her cause.

I'm still sorting out her character arc. The struggle of transitioning is obvious, but I feel I can't accurately write that sort of arc. On top of that, why couldn't we just have a trans female character who's comfortable where she is? Right now, I'm thinking that she wants to learn how to take care of other people, which would nicely reflect her 'motherly' status to Viola.

Not much of a difference in color here, but it's best to try.

Lots more reference material, but she ended up looking like a pretty stereotypical knight anyway.

Next post will be on Saturday as always.