sketchbook tour... kinda??? (Patreon)

I've been wanting to do more of those! But I quickly realized that I've already shared most of my previous sketches online lol.... I could still take pics and share them with the added commentary of course, but again just felt redundant since they're around Instagram and some on Newgrounds.. but if you guys would still wanna see those let me know!

So instead of going through my physical sketchbooks I figured I could stuff from a digital one!
This file goes all the way back to summer 2016, that's when I decided to actually start out developing some ideas of my own, this is all about Taifau Cafe stuff, aka Krea and the others!

Mighty No. 9 had finally come out that summer and I was super hooked, my love for it made me bring back some fan OC I had made for the game and turn her into something that I could use for my own, (if you scroll down below this link you can actually see said design lol.... I barely knew how to draw and used Flash!) I also tend to like characters that go in pairs, so I made up a boy to go with her, these being their very first designs:

These would be Mu and Ram respectively! They were meant to be the main protagonists, but my bias for Krea and her gang clearly shows since I barely draw these guys... I gotta change that though

The previous designs felt a bit too cute for my liking, especially Ram, so I tweaked his look a little bit to look a bit "cooler" lol. There's also a few other characters and stuff, the guy on the left was meant to be some sort of scientist, but he's been long scrapped, the long haired guy is Milo, Ram's rival/friend, who went through several changes leading up to his current design, and lastly some little exploration of the sort of machines that'd exist in their world, Mu is a robot so it only makes sense that there'd be fancy mechanical stuff like that

More exploration of these two, I was big into Akira at the time, hence the little flying vehicle at the top lol. Also on the Mu doodle right below it, you can spot some sort of X button on whatever it was that's replacing her arm, even since back then it was set that Krea would be a shop keeper, and all of her equipment would have said X button somewhere! 

And now we have the changes that Milo went through! Since he's meant to be a rival to Ram I decided on showing some of that through their designs, while Ram's sillouette has more weight on the legs and less on the arms Milo would be reversed, with thin legs and big gloves, I'd emphasize that much more on their later renditions years down the road. Also his name only starts with an M because his hair was shaped like the letter lol

And after being satisfied with this design the main cast was done and ready to go! All of them still went through a lot of changes, but they remained as solid foundations to work off of. Krea only had headphones because of Mighty No 9 lol, you'd be surprised at how many design choices were made because of that game....

Characters can only do so much if they're just made out to stand there and look cool, so I also started thinking what sort of situations they could get into:

Another potentially surprising source of inspiration was Pikmin! Especially the 2nd game, the idea of exploring around the world looking for treasure of a seemingly gone civiliation was super cool! The characters being these weird huge creatures and insects fused with mechanical elements was also really neat, the contrast between machine and nature was always interesting to me, so it naturally sneaked into this world

A good cast of characters also need interesting personalities! So I also dooldes some situations and interactions between them to see what their chemistry would be. Don was also introduced around this time, his relationship with Krea being a rocky one was also something set from the get go, I think it's generally more interesting to see how 2 characters deal with each other when they don't really enjoy each other's company that much but are forced to be together.

And that's about it! There's a few more things that I left out of this since they're long gone scrapped concepts that didn't go too far, nothing really substantial and besides, I feel like this post already went on for too long lol... the PSD file will be included in this month's rewards if you want to keep look out for the things that were left out

Thanks as always for reading , I hope this was interesting to some! There may be another file or two full of development ideas and such, if so I'll do another post like this! Otherwise back to the actual sketchbooks lol...

Thanks for your support as always! More drawings coming up this week