As the title suggests, this week was all about character art. Specifically, I wanted to get character art for all of the dialogue. The four characters who appear in the first couple of days that I have written right now should be the only speaking characters that appear in the seven-day demo, so I wanted to create characters for all of them to help spice up the dialogue.

I started with Dracula because he seemed like the best option to get the juices flowing. I am not an artist and will never claim to be, so I wanted to start with someone whose iconography is already pretty strong to reduce the brainpower I would have to spend brainstorming and to get myself in the zone to draw. From there I drew Jonathan, the boat driver, and ended with the cashier.

Because my drawing skills aren’t exactly classically trained, these character images are largely trace jobs, where I found people who I imagine in these roles, found good pictures of them, and then traced an outline of them to help get the general posing and facial structure. Then I went in and started detailing more to make them a little more unique and fit the characters better. I’m not in love with how any of the four turned out and they’ll definitely all need pretty extensive revisions eventually, but for now they’re all pretty effective images to pair with the dialogue and make the game feel a little more holistic.

Next up I need to create the 3D models for Jonathan, Dracula, and the bat in the combat scene. I haven’t done any character modelling for probably over a year at this point, so while I’d like to get all three done in the next week, I’ll likely have to split it up over at least the next two weeks.