Hey there, indieDB Community!
We are the Brainless Bunch, a Portuguese game developer team.
Welcome to our third article about the game we are developing, Essence of the Past.
Essence of the Past is a game about a woman going back to her abandoned childhood home, initially with the intent of selling it.
Our game explores the perspective of someone struggling to reconnect with her past and going back in time through memories captured by Polaroids scattered around time and space.
Here we are once again, ready to share with you all some of the newest updates regarding the progress of our game! Today we'll be going over the creation of the sketches for Laura (our protagonist) and Margarida (her mother) as well as some poses for their in-game art!
Character Sketches
On the last devlog, we showed you some of the thumbnails done for the appearance of both Laura and Margarida, as well as some of the research done to reach those results. Based on those, we proceeded with the creation of sketches for those two characters, finally reaching what would be their final design.
- Laura
For Laura's design, we had a good amount of ideas, and as such a total of 24 sketches were made, all of them different from each other in various ways. On the first set of sketches, we thought that Laura wasn't looking exactly like the 10-year-old she was meant to be, still a couple of their design ideas were later used to create the next sketches.
Figure 1 - Sketches for young Laura (1)
Next, a couple of more childish-looking Lauras were created, but they were looking a bit too happy compared to what we intended, so this time we put to use some of her outfit inspirations.
Figure 2 - Sketches for young Laura (2)
Finally, this set was the one we considered as having the most amount of potential among the 3 of them, and from these we ended up choosing the very first.
Figure 3 - Sketches for young Laura (3)
In this final design sketch for Laura, we have her looking very young, wearing clothes that were appropriate for the time (1985), and appearing slightly uncomfortable. From all the sketches made, this was the one that exactly fit our vision for the young version of our protagonist.
Figure 4 - Final sketch for young Laura
- Margarida
Now having a better idea of how the characters were meant to look, we were able to reduce the number of initial sketches to only 4, easily finding among them the one that fit Margarida the best.
Figure 5 - Sketches for teen Margarida
From the 4 sketches made, we settled on one mainly based on the one that had the most apathetic look, combining it with the clothes that would fit her personality and time period (1960) the best.
Figure 6 - Final sketch for teen Margarida
Character Poses
After settling on a design for Laura and Margarida, we observed the type of poses they would be seen in in the Polaroid photos and adapted them to their chosen design.
Figure 7 - Laura's and Margarida's poses in-game
We end here this development log, having seen the stages we went through to design these two characters in their respective time and ages! We've been having such a great time exploring these characters and their story and we can't wait to share all the other things we do with this project next week!
Thank you for checking out this seventh article of ours!
See you next week!
Brainless Bunch
