Technical Post - Morgan Concept Art (Patreon)

In keeping up with our trend of exploring some of the concept art for our characters, today's post revolves around Morgan. Don't tell the rest of the cast, but Morgan is most of the dev team's favorite character.

Design-wise, Morgan's a bit of a unique case. She's the only one who we didn't have an idea for in terms of appearance, so we gave Rosuuri free reign to come up with her look. She was designed at the same time Tara was, a few months after Abby and Maddie had been finished. As we mentioned in a previous post, neither Tara nor Morgan existed in the original premise of the game. In fact, it took Morgan even longer to really come into her own. When she was first created, we only intended to use her as a plot point to get Maddie and Tara out to Eysenfeld, but she wouldn't have much of a role beyond that. Now, the whole story revolves around her.

One of the first details we had to figure out was her hairstyle. You can see a couple of the ideas Rosu had. There are also some Tara hair options, since we were working on her look at the same time.

After we settled on a hairstyle, it was time to work on her outfit. One of the concepts had her in a dress with stockings, but while it was really pretty, it didn't really work with the wintery setting very well. So, instead, we gave her pants, plus her signature handknit sweater. This was the sketch for the dress version.

Finally, once deciding on that, we had to work out her colors. Like Maddie, one version had her as a brunette. Looking back at it now, for the first time in a couple years, I actually still like the color scheme here a lot. Maybe we'll use it for something else someday 🤔

Of course, we all know how that ended, and we settled on her current and final color palette pretty soon after that. Throughout development of the game, Morgan's role has really grown a ton. At first, she had far less screen-time than she does now, and so naturally had fewer sprite poses and art assets. We're all really glad that that's changed.

Hope you're looking forward to seeing more of her in action this Friday, when Heart of the Woods is finally released!