Change in direction

Despite my work on a female protagonist I still felt drawn to one of my initial thumbnails and decided to do some work on fleshing it out and seeing where this might take me.

Using Paint Tool Sai’s pencil tool, I roughed out a basic design, adding a checked shirt in place of the implied t-shirt in the silhouette, in addition to little touches like a singular hair flick (the fox ear) and a bird feather on the bag. I really like the rough result and it is making me doubt the path I am taking in creating my protagonist so I did some more work on the actual face of my character – settling on this:

Given I had created this on thin paper, I used it as an underlay and created a succession of character sheet expressions; ranging from Happy and angry – to Terrified and antagonistic. From these it was clear that not just a design but a character was emerging from this work very quickly. At this point I decided that this was actually going to be my protagonist character.

Anger - the hair flicks across the right of his face are much more jagged and aggressive than his standard pose to show the change in mood.

Disgruntled/ Bemused - I really like this expression because it really encapsulates those feelings - especially due to the drooping hair flick that really adds to the protagonists character.

A conventional anime smile - given the situation that is plaguing all of the characters in Zork, the player would only see this in rare, fleeting moments of funny dialogue or endearing occurrences.

The 'neutral' pose for the character - whenever he is listening or talking he will hold up the scarf in front of his face.

It is here where the anime style of the character really aids in conveying the expression of terror. The hair once again changes to suit the character's mood - sticking upright due to his alert status.

For this I had the hair droop slightly due to interference from the hand and because the character was deep in concentration - relaxing the hair 'ear'.



In the game since the character can become the antagonist due to the players actions I needed to find a way to make him more antagonistic - the shadow, creepier smile and changes in hair flick to seem more a kin to a horn than a fox ear were really good signifiers that worked to create an antagonistic look. Given the idea of trust and shadow in the game as a theme, I think the idea of including shadow across the players face instead of NPC's faces is an interesting subversion of that feature - perhaps hinting to the player that they dont know their character as much as they thought they did.



I had fun creating this and it was just an extra expression. In zork there would be a number of pointless but humourous actions that the player can take - one of which would be to put a bucket on their head. This would initiate a funny - slightly 4th wall breaking scene where the character would hint that perhaps some controlling force (the player) is at work.