New style for the Legends of Adrigal artwork

Introducing a more stylish art style for the artwork of Legends of Adrigal! The original artwork for Casey had more realistic proportions while still having a cartoon charm. However, I wanted to make Legends of Adrigal's artwork more special and different, so I made Casey, our protagonist, into chibi form! I hope to have a piece of artwork for Monica up shortly. 

It was a lot of fun drawing what I dub "Chibi Casey" in Inkscape (I used an anime chibi drawing as a reference for proportions), and I'm really proud of this albeit imperfect piece of artwork for Legends of Adrigal. What do you guys think? 

You've got a face for video games, Casey, Monica, Noah, and Nemus!

Continuing the aesthetic theme from a couple posts ago, Legends of Adrigal has a series of faces for the dialogue boxes in the game. Each character's face will appear as they are speaking. While Nemus and Noah were not edited at all-- instead using what the RPG Maker MV Character Generator created from my selections of facial qualities-- Casey and Monica were edited in Inkscape to add more modern touches to them. These are things like Casey's varsity jacket and Monica's cheerleader uniform. 

CASEY

MONICA

NEMUS

NOAH

Creating Casey: Making a character with help of RPG Maker MV's Character Generator

One of the hyped features of RPG Maker MV was its Character Generator, a resource maker that allows users to create their own characters from a myriad of options. Prior to RPG Maker MV, I was using the Game Character Hub to not only create sprites, but also to randomize the settings to make hundreds of NPCs to line the maps of Legends of Adrigal.

An obstacle to overcome with RPG Maker MV is that RPG Maker MV uses a different image size for sprites than RPG Maker VX Ace, the program I was previously using. Thus, to circumvent this, I used GIMP to resize all sprite sheets by 150% to make them fit the proportions needed for RPG Maker MV.

However, I wasn't happy with how the protagonist Casey turned out. For me, creating unique characters like Casey is done by editing a sprite sheet instead of starting out fresh. This is how the sprite sheet for Casey on maps looked in RPG Maker VX Ace:

I wanted an updated look for RPG Maker MV, so I used MV's Character Generator to start the process. In the Character Generator there are myriad options for creating and editing the face, hair (in both front and rear extensions), facial hair, ears, eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, facial marks, clothing, accessories, and other parts like tails or wings; allowing users to choose from one of about 24 colors for each segment of the sprite.

A look at RPG Maker MV's Character Generator.

Not only is a map sprite created from this process of picking and choosing parts, but so are the face for dialogue and menus as well as the sprite used in side view battles, similar to old school Final Fantasy games predating Final Fantasy VII.

Selecting option by option and piece by piece, the foundation for Casey was made.

Now, the foundation of the sprite I wanted for Casey was made. What I then did was use MS Paint to edit the map and battle sprites for Casey (for the battle sprite, this took some time as there were LOTS of sprite animations to edit-- though some could simply be copied and pasted over another animation). Taking these and putting them through GIMP (I'm more comfortable with MS Paint, so that's why I did the editing in that program instead of just doing everything in GIMP), I removed the background, making it transparent. Otherwise, there'd be a giant white box around each of Casey's sprite animations.

Through importing separate sprite sheets to my project,
 I was then able to begin the editing process.

I then took the foundation for Casey's face sprite and used Inkscape to draw and color in his varsity jacket. This process didn't take too long of a time, though I was being a bit of a perfectionist. Regardless, once that process was over, Casey's sprites were now able to be inserted into the game!

Hello, Casey, you handsome devil!

First artwork from Legends of Adrigal

Casey is the hero of Legends of Adrigal, brought into the video game world of Adrigal with his two friends, Monica and Noah. However, while Casey knows he's in a video game, it doesn't appear that the citizens of the kingdom know.

Dressed in a red and white varsity jacket and blue jeans, Casey's garb is quite different from what those in Adrigal wear. Perhaps he'll start a new fashion craze?

Casey was drawn in Inkscape using vectors instead of what I traditionally use, pixels and/or MS Paint.