Character Designs

Share this post:

Hey all it’s Serena here again! This week I’ve returned to bring you a little bit of an insight into our main character design and potential directions for the other critters living in our game world. Let’s have a look at where we started!

First Design Attempt

First Design

One of the first ideas we had was a slightly more “traditional” looking scientist styled character. It’s fairly obvious she was a researcher from her lab coat and goggles with an alternate slightly casual attire, but she was also following a more wholesome and cutesy design with her cinnamon swirl hairstyle.

We liked her a lot but ultimately decided to move away from it because we felt she wasn’t quite the right fit here. Space Botanist is, well, in space! What if there aren’t any humans from Earth at all? Perhaps we’re in a galaxy far beyond the capabilities of Earth travel. Either way for the time being we like humanoid but non-human.

Botanist 23

Once we figured that out that’s when the current main character design of 23 (working name) came to be! If you’ve been following our devlogs up until now, firstly thank you for sticking with us! Secondly you may have seen this design before so apologies that we haven’t been able to share too much just yet but there is a LOT of fine tuning still to do before we can safely call a design final!

23 is currently a female presenting humanoid character with purple skin and a fully functional cybernetic prosthetic arm. 23 fits well enough into the aesthetic with their simple space jumpsuit combined with gardening gloves and boots. I liked the idea of them having shorter naturally two-toned hair to keep things interesting.

I decided to give them very big eyes because while they have some backstory and personality of their own, they’ll likely play more of “Link”-esque role as the silent protagonist so people can more easily insert themselves into the game as they wish.

The very big eyes also give them a more alien, yet still open and innocent look. And it gives us more room to make their face visually expressive to really show their personality. This current look is also much more streamlined in comparison which will hopefully give our modellers more time to focus on emotive animations.

You can see in this picture that 23’s hair and face can sometimes have a glow to them, this was a choice I made to help the separation from humans and tie them closer to the bioluminescent alien plant life they interact with…maybe the two life forms have more in common then we think?

Who will you meet and what will they look like?

Of course with our goal to terraform a planet into a hospitable state and the requests system, there needs to be some life forms to make those requests! We’re still carefully considering which direction to go in for their designs but these are some earlier ideas for potential shop owners you might like to befriend.

Kaya is a more typically seen life form resembling a humanoid bird very much inspired by the Rito (Legend of Zelda) and the Avians (Starbound) may run a gardening store where you could pick up some basic starter seeds or assorted things for plant care.

Canine Mechanic is another humanoid life form who runs the mechanics shop to buy upgrades and make repairs when needed. He’s a little grumpy but has a good heart.

Unnamed Flame life form seems to be quite a rare one. She helps out at the mechanic’s shop and has been having a tough time caring for plants without burning them to ashes :(

But wait! There's more?!

That’s about it for now, we’re continuing to work hard on refining our character designs and philosophies for them to follow that we hope to share more of with you soon! Until then I’ve also got some very sneaky peeks at something I would really like to try and get into the game if there’s time...growable pets to keep you company on the space station!