Technical Post - OHMK Paige Sprite (Patreon)

In today's post, we wanted to give you a look at the design and sprites for Paige, the protagonist from our upcoming game "Our Home, My Keeper." We announced OHMK at Elanfest back in May, but haven't shared a whole lot of details on it yet. As we mentioned then, the story is written by ebi-hime, one of the most prolific visual novel writers out there. Character designs and art are being done by Madi, aka weeniedesu, with this being her first VN project. Although the first draft of the script has been done for a long time and just needs to be edited, sprite work only started recently. Already, they're looking great.

To start with, this was the design/concept art that Madi did for Paige. These concepts were the very first things completed, since we needed them done in order to do the key visual for the game's announcement.

Adi and I did the write-ups for the sprites, meaning we decided what poses we wanted to request for them. With VN sprites, the challenge is always trying to come up with ideas for poses that can be used in a variety of different contexts, and that are also different enough from each other as to stay interesting to look at. Typically, we shoot for something like 2 or 3 different poses for main characters and 1 or 2 poses for side characters, with a handful of different expressions. For us, "poses" specifically means torso and body position, and then arm positions are something else.

We chose to go with just one pose for Paige right now, and we might get a second one later on once we're further along. We found a couple reference images to include, and adi did a quick sketch that we included in our notes to Madi (I just realized how similar those two's names are). One of the references we used was a familiar face (and another Maddie).

As you can see, the torso and body itself doesn't change, meaning that the only parts that need to be redrawn are the arms. It's a lot faster this way compared to having to draw and color the full body more than once. When it comes to expressions, we usually get a bunch of different parts and then mix and match them, rather than getting several premade expressions. This lets us have a lot of flexibility and also diversity when scripting, since we can adjust to get exactly what we want. For these write-ups, we included the reference graphic for Gwen from PBH to show the different parts.

Once we were done with all that, we sent the docs to Madi so that she could get to work. We also included Aspen's sprite from PBH as a reference for how to format the file and organize the different layers. Not long after, Madi sent us back the first sketches for the sprites themselves.

Super cute, as you can see. Once we approved those, the next step was for her to finalize the lineart, meaning turning the rough sketches you see above into simple and clean, polished outlines. After the lineart is done, coloring begins. Here's one of the earlier stages of coloring for her head.

Finally, just a couple days ago, Madi sent us the nearly-finished version of the first sprite. A few things like the expressions still need to be finished up, as well as certain asymmetrical details. Since the sprite may be facing to the left or the right in-game, depending on what she's doing or who she's talking to, some bits need to be drawn twice so that they appear on the proper side no matter which direction her sprite is looking. These are usually things like hairpins, bags, and other bits that characters wear on just one side. Those parts aside, here's what Paige is looking like now.

We all collectively "awww'ed" when we saw. We're really pleased with how she's coming along, and can't wait to see the rest of the characters. Hopefully, you enjoyed this look too. The next character who'll be getting sprited is Fay, the love interest and resident fairy. We'll probably do a post on her as well once she's ready, so please look forward to that. We'll also be taking a look (well, a listen) at the soundtrack in progress by Singto Conley. OHMK should be coming out sometime in the first half of 2023, as part of a very busy year we have coming up. Until next time!