Character and enemy art - Kylie N

Extor was the first character our artist created. We designed them to be anonymous, androgynous, reminiscent of a void and wear futuristic clothing to emphasise their power and affinity to the cosmos. With the guidance of our designer who wrote the narrative and characterisation, and also compiled a character appearance description and inspiration collage, our artist was able to decide on character designs efficiently and begin creating the character assets. She was given quite a lot of creative liberty in terms of choosing the art style and colour palettes of the characters. At this point, we realised how crucial the role of a narrative designer and concept artist was. 

Our artist created each character’s body parts on separate layers so that they could be prepared for animation and made sure to visually check them on relevant game backgrounds. She made a few iterations to ensure that every character look like they are a part of the game world. Alcora’s first design in particular was scrapped due to being far too modern compared to the fantasy design of the other characters. Extor is an exception of course, as they were intentionally designed to look different from their companions.

Later on, our programmer also provided the artist with a helpful scene breakdown list so that she could edit the character and environment assets together to create the story art pages.

Main Character Extor Sprite Process

Companion Character Alcora Iterations

The Story of Extor - William W

Extor’s story was written in a similar vein to the Persona series. I wanted these characters to have a thematical aspect and role that helps give context to the background story, which is a similar tale about preventing the destruction of the world.

What makes Persona a special game for me are the other non-playable characters that impacts the player’s motivation on the gameplay, story and more. The game we made also emphasizes the importance of the characters and what sort of role they will play.

Extor aims to replicate that experience; I wrote the characters to have their own form of “speaking language” (i.e. Clarico being a formal-speaking woman as opposed to Beoul who speaks like a barbarian) and provide a narrative that makes these characters sympathizable. In retrospect, this is hard to deliver without higher level production quality (like emotional setup, music and sound, voice acting and clarity); players are more likely to have a reduced attention span of the presentation if they’re strictly reading.

I still chose to write them as if they are one-trick ponies at their occupation; Alcora is a gambler who will never stop gambling, Clarico chooses peace over war, Beoul is pro-war, and Verity likes to troll people. It's probably my favorite aspect of Persona, only amplified by the fact that these abilities are character-exclusive and changes how the game is played; if the player likes to deal massive damage, Beoul's probably going to be their functionally favorite character. Gambler? Alcora, probably.

The introduction of the game had to be rewritten: The original scene was to introduce two characters in a social place where the last remaining survivors live their lives, and eventually pitch the idea to fight the enemies that caused a world rapture. Due to technical limitations, that scene had to be rewritten again to accommodate all four characters, introduce their roles as fast and compact as possible and give the player a tutorial on how to fight the enemies for future gameplay.

The following playtest helped verify if these characters were creating an impression on the mind of the player. When (a playtester) was able to read the dialog in their pace, the response was as intended and checked the boxes that I was looking for. The current problem as of writing is that the story itself feels overwhelming and the clarity of the character’s persona is still not well defined, but there is work underway to fix these issues.