Character Design: Style focus vs. Character focus

I hope people haven’t been missing these devlogs too much in their recent absence. Although I could definitely think of things to write about every week, by default I don’t feel like everything I write about is necessarily relevant enough to other people to be worth sharing; I wrote one up a couple weeks ago which is still unpublished. But, I had a subject in mind this time which I thought seemed worth sharing around.

One of the most frequently praised features of Complex Relations is its character art, which of course I’m not responsible for. But, I was closely involved with the visual design of the characters, and Hoshiineko has been extremely attuned to the details that go into expressing those characters’ personalities. So, I thought it might be worth exploring some of the process behind that.

I wanted Complex Relations to have a strongly character-focused approach to design. What does that actually mean? You could think of it as an alternative to style-focused design. With a style-focused approach, the characters’ appearances are meant to cultivate a look which the designer thinks will look cool, or help apply their aesthetic vision to the setting, but isn’t necessarily intended to say anything about the characters and the choices that go into their self-presentation.

A bold fashion choice from a character who lives on a tropical island

With character-focused design on the other hand, one of the basic premises is that the characters can actually see themselves in a mirror. They dress themselves, and know what other people see when they look at them. Their choices about how to present themselves reflect how much thought and effort they put, or don’t put, into the subject. There might not be an in-story answer to the question “why does Lulu wear a dress made out of belts?” but there is an in-story reason why Vani has a butterfly on her shirt. That’s not just authorially dictated symbolism- after all, Vani bought the top herself.

The influence runs in the other direction too. After all, people also know about the things about their own appearances that they can’t change, and how other people see them, and that affects how they think about themselves.

Style-focused design offers answers to questions like “Why does this character look the way they do? What does it say about them?” But the answers are grounded in first-glance impressions. It’s not meant to sustain lines of questioning like “how long does it take to do up all those belts?” or “is this character’s hair naturally that color, or do they dye it?”

Pictured, a character who might spend all day doing his hair.

This is one of the reasons Complex Relations sticks to a palette of actual human hair colors. In a fantasy setting, if you see a character with purple hair, you can assume they probably have purple hair. In a game set in a Japanese high school on the other hand, that assumption becomes a lot shakier. Does the character deliberately coordinate her outfit around her purple hair? Does it affect how she sees herself as a person? Those are questions the writer probably didn’t dwell on much, and doesn’t want the audience to either. In contrast, Alexa’s hair looks red because it’s actually red; she knows it, and it definitely affects how she thinks of herself.

If anyone’s wondered about the design on Alexa’s choker by the way, and can’t make it out, it’s a Celtic knot. Feel free to speculate on why she picked it out.

There’s at least one other approach to character design, setting-focused, where the character designs are intended to be revealing of elements of the setting, like what sorts of clothes people have access to in what social classes, what equipment designs suggest about the functions they’re built for, how much styles are location-bound versus spread around by travel and trade, etc. A lot of fantasy works use style-based design when they could get a lot of mileage out of setting-based design… but that might be a devlog subject for another game.