Project Herald: A Thousand Faces (Patreon)

We received the final deliverable artwork for Luhlua yesterday, and I have been polishing and slicing some of the facial expressions.

I learned so much about project design and commissioning artwork from Infinite Stars and how to maximize our value for budget. All those skills are being channeled into Dreagan: Herald.

Infinite Stars has static images for each character expression. Having static images is easy to implement, but it does take up additional storage space. This has limited me from going overboard with the facial expressions since the game is also designed with mobile devices with limited storage in mind. It's super important to make the characters feel alive on the screen, and I worked around the limited facial expressions by having characters change expression mid-sentence, which serves the game very well.

With Draegan: Herald, I knew I would be able to create "layered" sprites, so we created our design briefs with that in mind. Infinite Stars has six facial expressions for each character. Draegan: Herald has nine facial expressions for each character, but by splitting the eyes and the mouth and recombining them, we can portray 81 different variations of emotions for each character. And since it's layered and only uses the nine base expressions, we can achieve this without using additional storage.

We did the same thing with our character jewelry and clothing variations.

Luhlua's dress has three variants (four if you include her wearing shoes or not), and her jewelry has two variants. Taking this into account and combining it with the facial expressions, I am able to portray roughly 1,000 variants of the sprite. (Ex. Nude, with surprised eyes, smiling face, and pearl necklace vs. Closed dress, no scarf, no jewelry, with closed eyes, and pouting lips)

Additionally, I've been experimenting with having the eye pupils move, either to predefined points depending on the situation (which would exponentially increase the possible variations) or even having them "follow" your cursor on desktop devices.

Each character in Draegan: Herald has a similar design (although some have more or fewer clothing variations than other characters)

I'll share more with all of you in the coming days! Have a fantastic weekend, and thank you to each of you for making this project possible.