This is a small side project to explain some decisions and ideas that came up during development.

Today I want to talk about character design, how I go from an idea to a playable character in my game Poke ALL Toads. First off, I don't consider myself a character designer. My method comes mostly from being self taught and bashing my head against a figurative wall. So please, take this creative process with a grain of salt.

When making a new character, the looks of it are the last thing that comes to my mind. I think more of the role it has to fulfill in the game or its personality and mannerisms. I really don't know where I will end and thats ok. So I start with a general idea. I write down what I want from the character, trying to keep the concept as open as possible.

"The witch fairy wears a green robe. She is a moody, low energy fairy. She must have something that makes people recognize her as a witch (maybe a staff?)"

Thats it. I like to have something simple or else I fear I will latch on details and not explore other options. On top of that, I add another rule:

"All fairies wear the same type of robe and should have similar body types"

This was a rule I had to abide from very early on. Every character requires dozens, if not hundreds of frames of animation. If you don't know, animation is a very time consuming process. If the characters are similar enough, their frames can be reused by other characters with some changes, saving several hours of work. 

Afterwards, I start to work with the aim of creating the basic idle frame first. This skips the concept art step and also other steps like creating character sheets. The reason for that is simple, I want to create a character that can work best for animation with the art style of the game while also avoiding the messy concept art to pixel art translation process. Pixel art is not a style that can adapt all characters easily. Sooner or later you will start making major sacrifices for fitting a character in pixel art. Maybe removing details, maybe face structure or even completely changing the shape of the body. So I prefer to design characters with pixel art in mind from the getgo, using the idle frame as a reference for the rest of the animations.

With this in mind, I use the blue fairy as a base, starting by changing her robe colors to any shade of green, which will be adjusted later. This leads into the first question, the hair color. 

 

For this I try all kinds of different colors. Changing colors is really easy thanks to hue shifting in Aseprite, so I was brainstorming really quickly here. The end result is a few ideas I wanted to explore in more detail. Here I will make a special mentions to the gray color, which I liked at first, but felt it could make the witch look older than the rest of the cast.

The two colors that I like the most were the orange and purple hues, so I experimented a bit more on them. It came to my surprise that the orange hair+green eyes combination I was using was too close to the ones people in real life can get. There is nothing wrong with using a real hair+eyes combinations for the fairies, but since all the other combos were fantasy ones, it felt a bit odd. So I decided on the purple color at the end.

Note that I have the rest of the cast present here. It is important that all characters fit together both in style and color selection, so they are there to measure contrast.

Next step is also very important, which is to infuse the personality of the new fairy into the the sprite. I consider that personality gives shape to an entire character while also inspiring new ideas. For example, I realized that her face didn't match her wings pose (standing up, high energy) which lead to changing them to stay low. This change would have been less obvious to come up with if I used a blank face.

They key here is experimentation. Maybe she could looked annoyed or maybe sleep deprived, you never really know until all the options are visible in front of you. 

Next step is to make her look like an actual witch. My first ideas were based around the placeholder sprite, so I worked on different hat designs plus adding a simple hair style. Little did I know I would stick with the first one I came up with, which doesnt happen too often. Another thing was experimenting with colors, trying out different shades of green.

And now comes the most important part of the process: get opinions and judge reactions. Remember that if you are making something for others, what others think about your work is important. I showcased my work to a group of people who I know can give me valuable feedback, either from their opinions or their reaction to what I'm showing to them. Receiving and giving feedback is a whole topic on its own, so I wont delve into details about it. I just want you to know I consider it a very important part of any creative process.

Before showing the above picture, I was happy with the hat design. Although I got some suggestions about "making the hat more witch-y", a lot of people loved the mushroom doodles. Their reactions was "Oh god the little mushroom!... Yeah the hat looks fine, maybe add some more color to it". The reaction was so strong that I decided to explore the idea a bit more.

The initial design was a mushroom that looked like a witch hat, combining two ideas into one. This had the big issue of breaking the color pallete. The purple now had a weird role in the image and the red dominated more than the green. It also made the fairy look too important, like a leader. But on the other hand people really liked the mushroom cap. I also changed her staff into a lavander stem with 3 flowers on top. These flowers would open while the witch magic was active. More on that later. 

So at that moment the mushroom cap idea was a bust, but I wanted to try to salvage it. 

The first step was trying other mushroom colors. The original mushroom, the classic Amanita, is red with white spots. But there is no need to stick to reality in a game about toad-poking fairies. Hue shifting was my best friend once again in this step. From all the experiments, I liked the bottom left one the most. The color was very similar to the purple of the hair while being different enough to not confuse one with the other. She still looked too important though, so the mushroom was downsized. Yes, a smaller hat makes her less important. A friend told me it gave her a "witch in training" aura. I wasn't really looking for that personality, but I liked the idea a lot. I kept it in mind moving forward.

The reactions and opinions to the new mushroom design were a lot more positive than the older one. She also meshed a lot better with the rest of the fairies. At this point I could have finished, but I was unsatisfied with the staff. 

First off, the three flowers plus the hat made the top part of the design too busy and complex. This was immediately obvious when compared to the blue fairy, but it was also true when compared to the other ones. Again, this made her look too important. 

Then the staff had 3 very detailed flowers sitting on top of it. Animating them, rotating them, would be hell. Simplifying them would make people confuse them with colored leaves, which did happen based on comments I received from previous designs. Finally it has the problem of having a 2-pixel width staff, which always looks off in pixel art and it is awkward for the fairy's tiny hand to hold.

I tried using only one flower, changing how it was held and its color, but the design still had too many problems. Then I remembered one of the suggestions I received, which was giving her a divining orb, a classic witch accesory. I didn't like much the idea of her carrying a crystal orb around, but I was stuck and I always open to experiment.

Suddenly a lot of the problems of the staff were gone. The top complexity, the awkwardness of the stem and the animation difficulty, all dissapeared. Yeah the orb's color clashed but I could experiment with that. Thanks to working with less problems, my head was clear to get new ideas. One of them was to replace the orb with a marble. It is playful and silly, so I tried it out and it wasn't too difficult do draw. As a plus her pose naturally changed and she stopped using the blue fairy pose, a leftover from using her as a base. 

With that out of the way, the last step was refinement, which means smoothing pixel curves and fixing lighting

 

The whole process took 3-4 days. Whenever I got stuck or I was uninspired, leaving the PC and coming back to it after a good night of sleep always had a positive effect on what I was working on. Showing my WIP around and getting feedback was invaluable to refine the concept while also being fun and motivating. With design out of the way and being sure the concept wouldn't change much, I was able to start animating in peace. That took weeks, but at the end of the day a new playable character was present into the game.

If you reached this point, thanks for reading. If you have any questions, please let me know and I will try to answer them the best I can. Until next time!