Fatemender character creation
With the announcement of our latest Fatemender features (store and sokoban) I'm finally able to share one of my favourite recent pieces of artwork; The Merchant.
The Merchant is a new character in Fatemender who is willing to sell you boons in exchange for golden paperclips. This makes him into one of the characters you'll see the most, and one of the few characters who gets their own scene and mechanics.
I thought that since I have videos from each step of the process for this character that it would be a fun one to breakdown the process with. (I don't always remember to turn on recording in Clip Studio). Character creation in Fatemender also always has two parts to it; the character and their card art. So here's a little peak behind the curtain at our studio flow.
Music
So of course what comes first is the idea "character who runs the in game shop". At which point my wife and I are now having our own thoughts and ideas for the character. She's often able to act first and because of that we often get a new music track for a scene before I even start drawing. This is fun for me because it gives me an additional facet of the character to draw inspiration from.
The music is the background music in some of the videos in the rest of this blog post.
Initial sketches
From the music track I had the first idea to make some large round plant creature. My ideas here were probably too big for the level of execution I could give the character. I thought it would be cute for leaves to lift up to reveal the different boons you could buy and then every now and then he would open his mouth and laugh.
My wife's idea was a little more straight forward, a crow who's picked up random things and sells them to you they can collect all the Golden Paperclips in existence.
I do like drawing birds so I swapped over to that.
These sketches all happened in Clip Studio on the iPad. I think I was possibly watching some of the Overwatch Championship streams while getting the base sketch in even. I spent many hours expanding on it and playing around with a few things. For a while I wanted to make a big round crow work so he would be a bit like the first round plant guy I imagined. But it felt like it would be difficult to balance with a wing out and kind of changed the vibe.
I was very afraid to have to draw all the feathers, a problem I already came up against on The Curse character. I didn't want to halfass it on the wing because I knew it would be shown full screen and be the background so the items. So I looked at many wing references.
With the idea of having the outstretched wing as the backdrop of the items my wife kept telling me to make it bigger. And then bigger again. I'm not sure if I crossed into unrealistic size or not...
I go over the sketch multiple times to refine the lines. It's a process I've been adopting, trying to go into lining with a more confident sketch so that I don't get lost trying to find the line while drawing the line. Once I'm happy with the sketch I move to my desk for the line work. There's something about sitting at a desk that feels more supported for drawing final lines.
Rendering
I've really come around to loving the Curve and using it for most lines when I can. First the body and then on to the wings which I was dreading. All those individual feathers, multiple times for each wing pose. I gave myself a whole morning just to do the 4 versions. I haven't wanted to rush any of the character pieces so I would often give myself a single goal for a day like: Finalize the sketch, do lines + flats, figure out detailing approach, shadows and light, extra detailing. And because of that it took multiple weekends of work to get through this one bird.
Final shading and details do at least go decently quickly, but I did take the time to try and do some design-y feathers on the body here. Something I was really worried about was working with such dark colours on a character in a game that's already got a lot of black.
Debated for a long time what to do with the eye. It seemed like it should be a place to make the bird more weird or scary. In a moment of rushing the assets into the engine I just left it empty and Sophie used it as an opportunity to animate the eye without any additional art assets which turned out very cool and strange.
Card art
For a lot of the characters I had the Fate Card before the character so I used those as a springboard to do the character art. This time I knew I was working with a crow as the central figure from the start which I thought would help get the concept out quickly but I ended up doing many different sketches before my wife said I should revisit a sketch I had done previously with a crown. A reflection of the wealth that the crow feels, or could feel, if they collecting all the paperclips.
Conclusion
Almost every step of the process is actively drawing something. I iterate visually and do almost nothing else. There's an early phase of gathering a few crow photos for reference but after that it's just me and the pencil. I want to practice doing more varieties of an idea so if I feel like a sketch isn't it then I'll just do another one. There's also a lot of back and forth between my wife and I sharing what we're working on. I like to show her all my early sketches and thumbnails and get her thoughts on them to help decide which one is selling the central idea best. I feel like this helps us stay consistent since we're both very familiar with how everything else looks in the game but sometimes you need someone to remind you that you can't do very small details in the card art cause no one will see it...
This is possibly the 2nd to last Fate Card character for the game. I have one more in the works I need to iterate on and then it's a matter of finishing up other art priorities and only starting more if we have more time. But we're possibly... getting close to the end??