Production Blog 1 - I'm Gonna Scream About Two OCs

So it’s October, and all the artists I follow are already putting up inked works to celebrate an annual tradition among illustrators: “Inktober.” For those not in the know, Inktober is an art challenge where you would draw an illustration, usually with ink, everyday for the month of October. Sometimes the challenge is coupled with a particular set of prompts to follow for each day. It’s mostly seen as a challenge one would do using traditional paper mediums, but I’ve seen many digital drawings over the last few years. I tried doing Inktober a couple of times, most of them either ending in not being able to draw for the full month, or me having weird ideas of pushing myself to draw using weird methods like taking free requests from followers and mutuals.

There’s another variant of Inktober I’ve seen, though: “OCtober.” It’s main prompt is that you would share your original character designs. Now, I don’t have enough original characters to fill out an entire week, let alone a month, but that won’t stop me from yelling about my kids. So here’s two of them I’ll be yelling about this month.

But about their design evolutions mostly.

Raina Ford

Cheerful.
Realistic optimist.
Naturally curious.
Kind of a slob sometimes.
A dedicated researcher.
A leader in the making.
Also constantly tired, but she doesn’t show it. Most of the time.

This is Raina Ford, the protagonist of this story who you’ll follow for the majority of the time. She’ll be the one who narrates and will be the one who’s inner thoughts we’ll see the most of. She’s a researcher who experiments with [insert term for magic coal I’ll probably explain later] and enjoys her rather peaceful everyday life.

This is actually the third iteration of her design. It’s a touch up on an older design that was a redesign for another character I made many years ago for a university project I hastily made because I spilled a lot of spaghetti trying to learn C++ while building something in Unity.

And if that’s a confusing sentence to read, don’t worry! The timeline is very simple and I’m just bad at writing English at 2am in the morning.

Initial Design

In the first version of her design, she was supposed to be an adventurer for a different story altogether. She was designed when I was heavily in love with the character designs from Falcom’s “Trails in the Sky” series, though I’m not too sure if this actually carries any of it, since this specific design was never colored.

Maybe it was the boots. God her feet are tiny. Why are her feet tiny. Do better past me.

She was a character for a small RPG game I tried making in Unity for one of my “Game Design Introductory” classes. I don’t have the project file anymore since my old hard drives failed, but I think that’s for the best. It wasn’t...of good quality. Good learning experience though.

Her personality was a bit different too. In her original design, she was supposed to be a very meek girl trying to overcome her shyness by trying to work as an attendant for an adventurer’s guild. Raina likes to take care of others due to her experience of babysitting her cousins, so she figured that she could use that experience working in the guild. I might try my hand at that approach for a different character.

Second Iteration

This was around the time I started drafting designs when I first rebooted this project and I placed Raina as protagonist. Originally she was supposed to be just an ordinary student and the story was set around the twilight of her university career as she set out to find her career. Instead of going with the oddly shaped pauldrons(?) and the good ol’ collared shirt/jacket thing, I gave her a more “preppy” outfit reminiscent of private school uniforms, though I think in context this is her personal outfit. Sweater dress, collared vest/sleeveless blazer(?), slightly longer hair, and a cute bow. The glasses were added after her initial sketch shown in the background because...I like glasses.

*The boots I still find really silly though.

She actually has a color scheme this time, and I gave her earthy colors with a bit of red accents to make her outfit pop out. Her palette is supposed to reflect her caring nature from her predecessor. However, in this iteration she’s more of a curious type, often tinkering with things she doesn’t know what they do, and tries to smash things together and see what works. She’s more extroverted at this stage as she actively engages with other peers and friends. The blue glasses don’t match, I know. I can’t actually say why because you’ll read the reasoning when the title releases...eventually.

Raina’s Current Iteration (Masky’s Adaptation)

She’s sporting a lab coat, too. That means this is serious research business.

And here we are now after so many rewrites and direction changes. Raina’s current design hasn’t really seen much difference in terms of color palette, though we gave her a slight gold hue for her hair. Her outfit has mostly retained its form. She tucks in her vest/blazer thingy underneathe her new plain skirt and continues the trend of wearing really silly boots. I mentioned that she’s a researcher, so we also gave her a lab coat. I think it looks nice.

Her personality hasn’t changed since the last design. I think the way she is now will be a good base point when she interacts with the rest of the cast, including someone very important.

Zylphia Averus

An absolute goofball.
Kind of a loose cannon.
Very caring.
A natural leader.
Those are some long shoes what.

Enter Zylphia, a girl who seeks adventure beyond the horizon, haunted by her failures and seeks closure for the mistake that grew ever larger. A lot of the problems Raina will face unfortunately are caused by her (though not intentionally). She’s a troublemaker, and the situation is compounded even further when you consider they’re dating.

Although in context she’s formally known as an independent privateer, she’s an adventurer through and through, traveling the world with her companions as they explore unknown lands funded by the work they do for other countries. For reasons you’ll experience later, she settles down in the city Raina lives in after a couple of years being in a long distance relationship.

Zylphia is one of my oldest designs, and probably the one I’ve iterated the most on. I have a PDF chronicling her design changes over the course of 6+ years, but I’m thinking of giving it a bit of a touch up later down the line. I won’t go over the entire timeline since that’s what the PDF is for, so I’ll give a basic rundown.

Zylphia was originally an OC for Trails in the Sky (shocking, right?) and didn’t even have a name then. Her design was repurposed to be a tabletop character I made during my early days of university, made for a campaign one of my friends wanted to host. It didn’t pan out well since our party couldn’t keep a consistent schedule with our classes, but I was intrigued with the world he created where he melded magic and technology together. The world of Zero Plane is loosely based on those ideas I’ve experienced when we all played our individual tutorial levels to get acclimated to the system we were using to roll our actions (I think it was called Equalizer).

Since then, I’ve made countless derivatives on Zylphia’s base before coming to where the current one stands, going from researcher to adventurer, then back to researcher as a retired adventurer, then back to adventurer again. She was supposed to star in her own visual novel project, but got shelved when this project was started. Here are some old concepts I’ve taken from the PDF.

Zylphia’s Current Iteration (Masky’s Adaptation)

We ditched the gray undersleeves from the design I sent Masky and honestly I think it’s for the better.

Surprisingly, her personality has remained relatively intact all the way from her original iteration. The research angle that she lost along the way was inherited by Raina when I started fleshing out her character, but her fire for adventure still rages onward.

We gave her a more casual look than her previous iterations since the story I want to focus on is more grounded in the everyday life rather than some grandiose hero’s tale (though we might see something more adventure-oriented, who knows).

I hope you’ll enjoy both of these characters when the project gets built into something playable in 2020. Maybe.

There’ll be another blog near the spooky festivities at the end of the month, and the brillipen twitter account should see more activity later on. See you all next time!