Sprites update: I’ve started on the main characters. Ash looks adorable with shorter hair.
Reneau is currently darker and has more rectangular features than intended, in my attempt to make the mixed-race character too pale. He’s supposed to be passably White, but I made the mistake of grabbing a deep shadow on a historic figure drawing of uniforms and going with it until I stopped to compare him with Ash’s sprite. Oops.
His skin is a pretty brown in this version, however. I might start over without a reference and squeeze in a background character using the misdraft.
A half-formed plan for the game artwork is to scarcely use it. The GUI can set up the scenery, the character sprites can be worked in to look less like dolls in theater and more like book illustrations.
The characters are bookish, as in bibliophiles. That illustrated prose style could suit them.
Speaking of suits, the US Army uniforms of the time are kind of funny. There’s a distinctive look to 19th Century cavalry, evil and creepy in view of the massively cruel crimes against humanity committed in the real history of the time; yet edging up to 1900, the Army overall was trying to figure out how French it wanted officers to look. Sashes? Badges? Medals? Tassels? Stripes? Functional or decorative hats? How important is underwear? Especially as I’m not intending to stick entirely to history, this gives me leeway to play around with what looks good to me on the characters.
Music: Good news. Popular love and comedy songs that originated in the late 1800s were recorded in the early 1900s and preserved by the US Library of Congress. My search for music to use in “Spirit of the Latch” was overly restrictive, because I didn’t have a list of titles to search up.