Technical Post - Maddie Concept Art (Patreon)

Today’s technical post features a look at some of the old concept art for Heart of the Woods. You see, Rosuuri wasn’t actually the character artist at the start. There were two others whom I asked to try drawing Maddie, with wildly different styles from what you see today. While both are very skilled artists, ultimately, the styles just weren’t what I was looking for.

The first artist was KaguraKurosaki. This was her take on the character, although we never got past the sketch phase. Obviously, her design has changed a LOT since then, although some familiar elements are there, like the way her hair is styled.

As you might remember from one of our previous technical posts, originally, HotW was going to be a very different game. Rather than the forest setting, the original setting envisioned was a small college town, with Maddie working as a barista at a cafe. So this iteration of Maddie was meant to fill that role.

After that, the next artist that we tried was Peach, also known as pcManiac. Peach specializes in drawing webcomics.

This version of Maddie looks a lot closer to the present-day one, with her glasses, hairstyle and hairpin (hairclip? I don’t really know what it is) being the same. Also her boots. We changed up her sense of fashion to be a bit more trendy and cute.

Finally, we contacted Rosuuri, whom as you’ve all seen ended up being the perfect choice. These were the first takes she did for Maddie.

It sticks pretty close to the design that Peach did, but we added the sweater for some color. At first, I was a big fan of the blue, but we decided to go with green. That got upgraded to the heavier jacket and scarf when we changed the setting to be more snowy. We also decided that she’d look better blonde, rather than brunette.

Abby, Tara and Morgan were all designed by Rosu, so there’s not any drafts from previous artists for those characters. Abby was initially designed for the old setting, too, but her being a ghost meant that we didn’t need to give her warmer clothes once we changed the premise. Tara also existed back then, but it’s pretty in-character (in-Taracter?) for her to not worry about the cold. Morgan was a character we created specifically once we settled on Eysenfeld for the setting.