Behind the scenes: Designing Melody, Allison, and Claire!

Apologies for the wait between behind the scenes posts, everyone! I'm generally still trying to build up the energy to make things again. In the meantime, to make up for the wait between posts, let's dive into a big and exciting topic that I'm sure many of y'all will be interested in: the design process behind the original three Novas!

In this post we'll be talking about the creation of Melody, Allison, and Claire, who were designed together at the very start of SLARPG's development. (Jodie was designed later, so she'll probably get her own post in the future. This one will already be long enough!) Some of this will be material I've shared before elsewhere, but other bits will be brand new! This will be by far the most thorough look possible into the process of designing these three, where my head was at at the start of development, and the ways their appearances evolved over time!

As usual, this post will contain spoilers for SLARPG.

Background

As I've said before, Super Lesbian Animal RPG began its life as a humble fangame I made in 2013, when I was 19. My first ever RPG Maker project. I started toying around with the idea of remaking it as something wholly original in early 2015, as a potential "easy side project" that could get my creative juices flowing again while I struggled with my other project at the time, a narrative adventure game titled Andromi.

The earliest file I have relating to SLARPG is a screenshot of the new grass and tree tiles I'd made for what would become Greenridge, dating back to March 30th, 2015. Just as a little experiment to see how much I'd improved in two years. I didn't know if I'd ever do more than this.

The remake would go on hold for a few more months after this, since I felt like I should've been working on Andromi rather than retreating to the comfort of an old project. But I kept thinking about the possibilities.

In particular, I wanted to revisit my previous work because I wanted to use Javis and/or Verena in future games. (I wanted to establish that Verena had become the immortal queen of the Martians in Andromi's universe after severing her ties with Javis in the original game. Is this the first time I've mentioned this anywhere? I think it might be.) If I was going to keep using those two, I wanted them to have a new point of origin that wasn't an RPG Maker fangame that had been taken down for copyright infringement. Something that people could still actually find and play without having to dig through shady third party reuploads.

Oh, and, y'know, if I wanted to deal with the copyright infringement, the remake would need new protagonists, since the original game had used characters I didn't have the rights to. But rather than simply making 1:1 expies of the characters used in the old fangame, I decided to go all out, creating new characters that could fill those roles while also standing on their own. Over time, they would only drift further and further away from their predecessors as I gave up on 1:1 parity with the old fangame and doubled down on my own ideas. In hindsight, the fangame would end up being merely the rough draft, a glorified proof of concept demo, while SLARPG was the fully realized version of story I wanted to tell in my heart all along. And a ton of that comes down to the new characters.

Melody!

Things would really kick off for SLARPG on July 20th, 2015, in a humble little file named "character design scrap.psd." This is where Melody - and, really, the entire game as we know it today - was born. I developed SLARPG's character design aesthetics and color palette as I designed Melody's initial sprite. It all branched out from her. As such, the earliest iterations of Melody varied a lot, as we'll see in a moment. But first, I wanna talk about the mentality I had going into designing Melody.

For one thing, I wanted to differentiate Melody from Andromeda and Naomi from Andromi (seen above). I wanted the two games to stand apart visually, but I also knew that I'd kind of held back with Andromeda and Naomi's designs, even if I'm still fond of them. They may be furries, but in 2014 I was still new to openly being a furry artist on the internet, and I was worried about them putting off general indie game playing audiences and my fellow indie devs if they seemed "too furry." (In other words, if their animal features weren't simplified and cartoony enough, if they used too many different bright colors, or if they appeared to be even remotely sexualized by having any curves whatsoever.) I wanted to be able to post about my work on places like the TIGSource forums and IndieDB without feeling out of place. So I kept the designs pretty simple, cartoony, and chaste in an attempt to give myself plausible deniability. "No, this isn't necessarily a furry game, per se... it's just a game that happens to have cartoon animal characters in it, like Animal Crossing or Star Fox or whatever! Anyone can enjoy this!"

But SLARPG was born as a side project made for an audience of me, myself, and I. It was just gonna be this little thing I did in my free time that didn't need to be a hit, it just needed to exist to preserve the general ideas of my first game in some form. I could be as self-indulgent as I wanted with the character designs and no one could stop me.

So when I started designing Melody, I went in knowing three things I wanted to do with her appearance:

1. I wanted her to be a fox.

As everyone here knows, while she's not a pure self-insert, there's a lot of myself in Melody. The other characters, too, but mainly Melody. This can even be said about the species I chose for her. While on the one hand, yes, she's a canid, just like my Samoyed fursona, I specifically chose to make her a fox because my original fursona from middle and high school was a fox.

If you haven't seem him before, meet Bobert.

These date from like 2007 to 2010, when I was between 13 and 16. Believe it or not, he's an arctic fox. The in-universe explanation for his brown fur was that he had a permanent "summer coat" because he lived in Daytona Beach, like me. The real world explanation is that he had brown fur because I have brown hair. Bobert was supposed to be the protagonist of a webcomic I never got around to actually starting, creatively titled "Shenanigans." Before that, he started out as my self-insert sprite for collaborative "author comics" on Smack Jeeves.

Yes, he did, in fact, begin as a recolor of Tails' Sonic Advance sprites with different clothes and Sonic's spines attached. Which means Melody can trace her design lineage directly back to Tails! You can really see it in the eyes - the way I do eyes on SLARPG sprites is directly inspired by Sonic Advance.

2. I wanted her to be pink.

Pink's my favorite color. Pretty straightforward! This also differentiated Melody from the cast of Andromi, who had more muted body colors.

And finally,

3. I wanted her to be fat.

I've always been fat, but I'd never really worked with fat characters before. As a teenager, I drew myself as a skinny fox boy. This was the era of the Gamer Webcomic, when artists would draw themselves way skinnier because it was embarrassing and shameful to admit that you were really a fat nerd. With Andromi, I made both of the protagonists extremely thin by default. I didn't even really know how to draw fat people at the time.

But I wanted Melody to look more like ME, dammit! I'm 5'11" and weigh 300 pounds. I've been this size for most of my life. I could stand to exercise more and drop a few pounds, but I sincerely doubt I'll ever be thin at any point in my life, and I'm totally cool with that. Melody is a reflection of that.

I've said many times before that SLARPG was me taking matters into my own hands and creating the characters I could relate to that no other media was making for me, and Melody's weight is one of the biggest parts of that, almost on par with the fact that she's trans and bisexual. There are still barely any fat women in major roles who are portrayed positively in popular media, period, let alone as heroes in genre fiction. Lead protagonist roles? Forget about it. So I wanted Melody to be unapolagetically fat (and also fairly tall and broad-shouldered, like I am), and for it to just be an accepted fact about her. For all her many insecurities, Melody isn't concerned about her weight. Nobody makes fun of her for it. It isn't the butt of any jokes. She can enjoy sweets without being self-conscious about it. She isn't treated as ugly or oafish or gross, but on the flip side she's also not treated as a fetish object. She's just a fat trans girl surrounded by people who love and support her unconditionally.

I'm very, very glad that that story has reached an audience that really resonated with that. I love getting messages from people who say they feel more comfortable with their bodies because of Melody. That's exactly the kind of thing I hoped for when I made her. I was already pretty at peace with my weight by the time I designed Melody, but even I feel like I accept my own body a little more ever since I created Melody. I've also just gotten way better at drawing fat bodies in general. It's kind of surreal to look back on a time when I never drew fat people now that I default to drawing large furry women.

(And on the subject of Melody's body type, yes, I did also give her big boobs lmao. They're pretty proportional to her overall body size, but I cannot lie about that fact. We live in a post-Pseudoregalia world, live your truth. I've seen some good-natured discussion about if it's just genetics or if it's HRT or if it's magic or if it's because she's got a lot of body fat in general. The answer is that I have breast dysphoria and I was projecting an idealized form onto my character. And also that Melody deserves them. But I just wanted Melody to be fairly busty without using it for constant fanservice gags. I treat it very matter-of-factly, in the same way that I treat her weight.)

Designing Melody's sprite

Anyway, with those general goals in mind, we FINALLY come to the evolution of Melody's sprite, through which her design was created! For all of the Novas, I would start with their sprites first, knowing that the designs needed to be simple enough to look good at such a small resolution.

1. I didn't yet know what I wanted the art style of the game to look like, as you can see from the big ol' sparkly doe eyes and flat colors on this earliest WIP. I just started working on a pink fox, with the rough shape of a body that I could work on more later. Even still, you can already see some of Melody's face here at the very beginning!

2. I didn't know what to do with the hair. You will hopefully immediately recognize that this would later become Claire's hair.

3. Melody's hair begins to take shape! She had a lot more of it at this point. This was actually based directly on a photo I found on Google images when browsing for hairstyle references. I wish I'd saved the actual photo. I believe the woman in the photo had shiny bleach blonde hair, and I replicated its lighting in the photo with a white-to-blue color ramp. I also tried out a different, simpler eye style here and a white muzzle.

4. The long hair was covering up way too much of the sprite and was too detailed, so I sweep half of it over Melody's shoulder. The color palette also changes, with the silvery blue look being replaced with Melody's signature multicolored white/pink/purple hair. Over time this hair palette morphed from stylized shading into Melody having white hair that's dyed with a pink/purple gradient towards the bottom.

5. Suddenly, Melody becomes.. well, Melody! Her proper color scheme is here, with the color ramp from her hair reused for her body colors and her pinks complemented with minty green eyes and clothes, tying in to the color of her healing magic. I didn't know what to do with her top, so I defaulted to starting with a plain T-shirt just to flesh out her body shape in solid green without worrying about surface details, which ended up sticking. The triangular pattern on her skirt is a blatant reference to the traditional White Mage garb from Final Fantasy, further signaling that she's a healer. And finally, she has some gold accents on her boots and bracelets.

6. Sick of the long hair, I decide that Melody's hair is only going to go down to her shoulders... which is how long my own hair was at the time lol. I also tried giving her some simple shoulder pauldrons to make her look a little more like an adventurer.

7. I refine the shaping of Melody's face and body a little more. The hard black outline separating her chin from her neck is gone, her torso shapes are a little rounder, and her arms are thicker. Her tail doesn't stick out to the side quite as much, and I flip it to the opposite side to visually balance out the way Melody parts her hair. I try out a different shape for the pauldrons. I try giving her a necklace as an accessory. These accessories remind me of Krystal's original Star Fox Adventures look, in hindsight.

8. I lose the pauldrons and necklace. I want Melody and Allison's outfits to look a little more casual, since they aren't full-blown adventurers just yet. I try adding some visual interest by giving Melody a lower cut shirt with visible sports bra straps, likely inspired by Amethyst's initial look on Steven Universe. I quickly move away from this because it makes for less of a clear visual separation between Melody's head and torso.

9. I continue to throw ideas at the wall for Melody's top, this time giving her a big ol' bow and adding polka dots to her shirt. The polka dots were inspired by me looking at the colorful fabric patterns in Yoshitaka Amano's Final Fantasy designs and trying to inject a little of that flair into the SLARPG designs.

10. The neckerchief! (Or as Anthony has called it, "Melody's gay little ascot.") Finally, a neck accessory that I actually like for Melody. You'll notice that I flipped Melody's entire sprite here, mainly so that her hair would look better in her right-facing portrait art. I also adjusted the look of her bracelets to make them more three-dimensional, perhaps slightly inspired by Amy Rose's bracelets. I initially intended for them to be loose bangles, but I got kinda lazy over the years and they became tighter around Melody's wrists because it's easier to draw them that way. I believe this was the sprite Melody had when I first revealed the game in December 2015.

11. Post-announcement refinements. At first, the game used a 22% brightness gray in place of black, like the old fangame did, but I quickly found this was limiting the richness of the game's color palette and changed it to a pure black. In terms of Melody's actual design here, the hair on the left side of her head is now visible from the front, since I finally figured out a way to do that that I thought looked good. And her shoulders have been raised up a little, too, to make her proportions look more natural. In general, she was made to look more like she does in my full-sized drawings of her.

12. And, lastly her final sprite! There are some minor refinements here, but mainly I lowered her nose and mouth exactly one pixel to make her face seem less squashed from the front.

Here's a gif version of this evolution to drive home all the little tweaks:

Melody's full scale design

We're not quite done talking about Melody yet, though! Because after designing her sprite, I also had to figure out what Melody looked like at higher resolutions!

First face concepts (2015): These were done basically right before the reveal art. You'll notice I had yet to flip Melody's hair - it was only during the process of drawing the reveal art that I decided it would be better for her hair to part the other way. Her facial structure is a little different early on with a shorter snout, a :3 mouth, and a visible chubby cheek. Her neckerchief is more of a bandana at this point, too.

Reveal art (2015): To be blunt, I hate Melody's head in this one. It looks worse than the preceding concept sketch. Her face is weird. I'd decided to flip her hair, but the way I tried to depict some of her hair wrapping around the left side of her head makes it look like she has a weird, bulbous head. Her eyes are too small. She has little tiny feet. I could go on. I was still figuring out Melody's design as I drew this reveal art, my second ever drawing of her, and it shows. You never really fully nail down a character design until you've drawn them a bunch of times, but I just wanted to hurry up and announce the game.

A more positive fun fact: I designed Melody's Secondhand Staff while drawing this very image of her. It's bent simply because it would have blocked her face otherwise, and I didn't want to redraw her hands in a different position. I came up with an explanation about it being a crappy used staff that had been bent out of shape by its previous owner, which I felt fit the Novas' roles as underdog rookie adventurers, and later I made Holly the one responsible for bending it. And then it just stuck around as an iconic part of the game, to the point that people have made replicas of it for cosplaying purposes. Incredible.

There's also a pixelated version of this early reveal art with various expressions, from when I was figuring out the style of the dialogue box portraits.

I didn't love these, so saving time by just scaling down higher res drawings won out in the end. I never cared about SLARPG being a 100% pure pixel art game.

Face revision (2016): Ah, much better! I started to get a handle on what Melody's face looks like, with a more natural fox snout and slightly revised hair shaping. This would serve as her placeholder portrait art for a while. I also figured out how I wanted her neckerchief to look.

Expression experiments (2017): These were done at a time when I still thought I'd be drawing the prologue comic myself, so I figured I needed to practice drawing Melody in different angles and with different expressions. These are still pretty good, even if it's not quite her final design.

Demo key art (2017): This is where I REALLY nailed Melody's look for the first time, I think. (And everyone else's, too.) There's a reason why I still use this art to this day! By this time I'd started drawing my fursona more, which helped me a lot with the anatomy since her body shape is basically identical to Melody's. But also I just think Melody's face is super cute here.

Comic outfit concept (2017): I think I did this shortly after the demo key art. You'll probably notice right away that Melody's in-game portrait is, in fact, a crop of this drawing! I got her face completely perfect here and didn't feel the need to draw it again for the mugshots.

Profiile art (2021): And, finally, Melody's profile art, as seen in-game and in a bunch of promotional material! I still like this one, but her eyes might be a little big. I default to drawing eyes a little too big. Everyone's eyes got bigger over time lol

While discussing these refinements, I also wanna say that a big thing that helped was, in fact... fanart! Seeing other takes on my designs helped me get a clearer idea of how I wanted them to look - what features to emphasize, what to tweak, what things people were already tweaking to make them look a little more natural, what wasn't coming off quite how I intended. So thanks again to everyone who drew fanart in those early years and unknowingly helped me workshop the designs a bit.

Allison!

Allison was easily the character I had the clearest image of in my head before I sat down to make the sprites. Which is perhaps surprising given that I wasn't 100% sure what her species would be.

Believe it or not, for a brief period before I sat down and started working on the sprites, I debated whether or not I wanted to make the characters humans, to further differentiate the game from Andromi. And I'm pretty sure that's when Allison's look crystalized in my head. I knew she'd be more butch in contrast to how femme I wanted Melody to be. I knew I wanted to lean into her being kind of a punk, since I was literally naming her after the Jeff Rosenstock Song "Hey Allison!" I knew exactly how she'd dress, and that her hair would be a spiky faux hawk undercut type deal. Because of her role in the party, I also knew I wanted her to be thin but muscular, contrasting Melody's larger build. And the light brown color I used for her fur is identical to the color I would've used for her skin tone if she'd been a human instead.

Of course, it didn't take long for me to decide that yes, the characters should be furries. While making the characters humans would have been a change of pace for me, damn near every other RPG in existence already stars humans. Furries were the more fun and interesting choice, and also the choice that was truer to what I really wanted in my heart. And that meant Allison would become a rabbit, which I thought would pair with Melody nicely. On top of both of them being common woodland critters (that I hadn't used for any Andromi characters), these species choices constrasted with their personalities in interesting ways. Foxes are normally portrayed as sly, crafty hunters, but Melody is introverted, gentle, and self-conscious. Bunnies are soft and cuddly prey animals known to run from danger, but Allison is brave, adventurous, extroverted, and the team's strongest physical fighter. That's fun to me.

Making Allison a bunny brawler was also definitely a choice influenced by Bunnie Rabbot, since at that point I was rereading the Archie Sonic comics for Thanks Ken Penders and remembering how much I loved that character. Brief aside: once during development I caught myself thinking "man, wouldn't it be cool if in some future story Allison lost an arm and replaced it with a cool robot arm" before realizing I was just further turning her into Bunnie.

So I made this image:

Getting back on topic: When combined with the fact that I'd already figured out the art style for the sprites while designing Melody, this clear image meant Allison took way less revision than Melody did. It mostly came down to messing with a few specific details and figuring out a color scheme.

Designing Allison's sprite

1. Like I said: most of the design is already there! Allison is already recognizable, although at first I wanted to give her droopy ears. This was to contrast with both her gravity-defying hairdo and the upward shape of Melody's ears. As for all the pinks and purples, I'm pretty sure this was a placeholder color scheme.

2. Her face looked a little too passive, so I changed her eyes a little, and I made her ears swoop out to the sides for a better silhouette.

3. The complementary yellow and purple color scheme appears! This was when I started to realize that I wanted these first three characters to all have complementary color schemes, like how Melody has a pink and green theme. Allison becomes blonde and her shirt turns yellow.

4. The droopy ears still make Allison look too passive to me, so I ditch them. At this point Allison's design is there, but her color scheme has changed to an orange and blue one. I had started designing Claire by now and given her the yellow/purple palette, so Allison had to change. I also thought leaning more into the blues might go better with her blue jeans. 5-7 are further attempts at this orange/blue color scheme, eventually shifting the orange more towards red.

8. By this point Allison and Claire had traded palettes again, and Allison returned to the yellow/purple look that I felt reflected her association with electricity. Her brown fur becomes slightly rosier in tone - I think it goes better with the purple and contrasts nicely with her blonde hair. However, I also tried out giving her fingerless gloves, shorts, and high-top sneakers briefly, just to see if I liked it. The cutoff shorts just make me think of this scene from Always Sunny. Honestly, I probably could've kept the fingerless gloves for the final look. They're not bad. But like with Melody, I wanted to keep Allison's outfit more casual. They get unexpectedly roped into an adventure when they're not quite ready, so Allison doesn't have a full adventuring outfit figured out yet.

9. The sprite Allison was first revealed with, keeping the previous palette but reverting her outfit.

10. Early revisions. Like with the rest of the game, the outlines become pure black, but her hair is also edited to more closely match how I'd chosen to draw it for the full-size illustrations, and her collar starts to get poofier. And I moved her little eyelashes exactly one pixel inwards so they'd look less like angry eyebrows.

11. The final sprite! Her collar has grown even poofier, but most noticeable is that I got rid of her thigh gap and made her thighs bigger. This looks more natural and better reflects her artwork.

Speaking of her artwork!

Allison's full scale design

First face concepts (2015): Drawn alongside Melody's concept art. (Like with Melody, I tried two eye sizes.) I mostly got it right in one go here. Some of the shaping would change a bit, she'd lose the bean mouth look, and her collar would grow way poofier over time, evolving from sort of an aviator jacket collar into a big (faux-)fur collar that matches her fluffy cotton tail. But she's recognizable here. The way I simplified her hair into distinct chunks with three-tone shading would influence both the look of her sprite and the way I drew many other characters' hairstyles throughout the game.

Reveal art (2015): Still a little messy, but again, she's recognizable. Like Melody, she has a :3 mouth expression here, which she'd lose in all future art. It had been an on-the-spot decision after I ended up hating a big bean-mouth grin that looked like this:

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Early portrait art (2016): Every other Allison face I've ever drawn has been me attempting to recapture how perfect her face is here. Her neck looks a little long, though.

Demo key art (2017): Like with everyone else, this illustration was the first time I felt like a full body drawing of Allison really looked natural. Her thighs also started to grow a little bigger here.

Comic outfit concept (2017): Allison's eyes feel slightly off to me here, but otherwise she looks good. By this point I had fully embraced the fact that I wanted Allison to have watermelon-crushing thighs lol. Again, live your truth.

Profile art (2021): And the final profile art!

Unused ideas

While Allison's design was being refined in high res, though, I often felt like something was off about her outfit, and would return to her sprites to experiment on some changes. It felt like there was still room for improvement. I'd occasionally try things like adding extra detail to her jacket or giving her an exposed midriff. Something about the blue jeans also felt like it muddied the color palette a bit, so I tried adjusting the palette a few times. But obviously none of these stuck.

Claire!

Claire was the first character whose species I didn't already know by the time I started working on these sprites. I did, however, know that I wanted her to be a foil for Melody, as both the party's other caster and the other trans girl of the main cast. Where Melody is tall, broad-shouldered, and fat with a bigger bust, Claire is short, scrawny, and flat-chested, envisioned as a character who's either been on HRT for way less time than Melody or even chosen not to use hormones at all. They balance each other out so that neither will come off as some sort of declaration for what all trans women should look like.

But while I knew what kind of build I had in mind for Claire, and the fact that she'd be a witch, I didn't really have much else. So I started with her hat.

Designing Claire's sprite

1. I nailed the general shape of the hat on my first try, but then came time to think up a design for the character below it. Claire started out as not a cow, but rather a sheep, with brown fur and a much friendlier demeanor. On some level her vibe was kind of inspired by Lotte from Little Witch Academia.

2. Realizing that the hairstyle I was toying with looked kind of like my first draft hairstyle for Melody, I just went and grabbed that hair and gave it to Claire. Her blues shift slightly towards cyan, probably to match the blues used on the other sprites.

3. This was the first point at which Claire and Allison swapped palettes. Claire's fur became yellow (with orange hair building off of the same yellow-orange-magenta color ramp) so that it would complement her purple clothes. Overall she had kind of a sunset color palette here.

4. Suddenly, my brilliant idea hits: what if I made Claire a cow? Cows are cute. I love a good cow furry. This may or may not have been influenced by the fact that I mained a female Tauren paladin in World of Warcraft around this time. Her poofy, fluffy hair was orginally supposed to evoke sheep's wool, but I would eventually justify it by saying she's a highland cow. With this change in species also came an unrelated change in expression to differentiate her more from Melody and Allison. Tweaking just a handful of pixels would completely redefine the vibe of the character and help steer her somewhat antisocial characterization. Claire can still be energetic and upbeat when she's in the mood (usually when she gets to talk about magic), but the rest of the time she's lower in energy, more sarcastic and matter-of-fact. She has one horn poking out from beneath her hat, which to me hints that she can be a little dangerous. On top of this, her hat also gains a triangular pattern similar to Melody's skirt, but with the triangles inverted - because Claire's spells make HP go down instead of up.

5. I start to figure out the outfit. I believe at the time I had already figured out the general relationship between this initial trio, with Claire being an overzealous guild master who ropes two of her friends into joining her on adventures and gives them magic powers. Because of this, Claire is the only one of the three who fully dresses the part as an adventurer. The actual articles of clothing here - a guild tabard inspired by WoW, a long-sleeved dress, dark leggings, and pink Mary Janes - would stick, though I hadn't quite figured out the color arrangement yet. Claire's outfit also kind of has some Touhou vibes to me, though I had yet to play any Touhou games at the time.

6. Claire is now recognizable in all but her color scheme! Her hair's longer, she's gained a tail, and her clothes have the proper color layout. The pink trim around a white tabard was very much inspired by the tabard of a small guild my friends and I had made in WoW around that time.

7. Thinking the pink trim on the tabard blends in with her purple dress, I try inverting the colors.

8. Claire trades palettes with Allison again to gain her proper color scheme! And then sprites 9 and 10 are the final revisions to Claire's sprite to make it more resemble her artwork etc. etc. you get the pattern at this point

The secrets of Claire's color palette

So, obviously, the first thing a lot of people see when looking at Claire is the trans pride flag. I definitely see it, but as a line of dialogue in the game implies, this was a happy accident. I don't think I even noticed it myself for a few years. (Believe it or not, if you ever find yourself wondering if a character design of mine is supposed to evoke a particular pride flag, nine times out of ten the answer is going to be "no.")

My actual thinking with Claire's color scheme was twofold. One: Her orange hair and blue clothes completed the complementary colors theme that Melody's pink/green and Allison's yellow/purple looks started, and it also ties in with her use of fire and ice magic. But on top of that, Claire also has a cyan/magenta/yellow motif going on... which visually connects her to Javis and Verena.

Yes, from the very beginning I was subtly attempting to sow the seeds of a Claire betrayal fakeout (or at least the idea that she had a connection with the villains), particularly for returning players who already knew about Javis and Verena and would potentially recognize their signature color scheme.

You ever look closely at the notebook Claire has in the key art for the demo?

While in reality Claire isn't evil and didn't willingly summon Javis and Verena, I kind of wanted to put players in the shoes of Melody and Allison. They don't entirely trust Claire, and they lose some trust in her when they realize she's responsible for the mess they're in, but then later they sympathize with her when she starts to open up emotionally.

(Once Paula was added to the cast, I also used Claire as a red herring to distract players away from Paula as the obvious rival character. In hindsight, I probably could've stood to have done a little more with Paula before the big reveal to really make sure she stuck in the player's memory, but I knew that drawing too much attention to her after revealing someone in Greenridge was a traitor would make it pretty damn obvious it was her. Not many Greenridge citizens are mean to the party.)

Attempted revisions

To be honest, I was never quite happy with Claire's face on the sprite. It has a lot of details in a small area, and I also felt like I could've stood to make her big ol' cow snoot a little bigger, to more closely match her artwork. I tried a few alternate faces for her later in development, but would ultimately revert to the original (seen here on the left).

My main problem with these was that widening her nose made her mouth completely blend in with her nose on the sprite, when viewed from afar. The first revision also kind of made her collar look like giant buck teeth. Covering up the collar with a hard black outline to divide her chin from her torso fixed this, but I disliked losing the detail of the collar. And widening her nose without moving it down a pixel, like in the fourth option above, made her face feel squished. So in the end I just stuck with the original look instead of trying to make it look perfect. As a wise man once said: "Perfect always takes so long / Because it don't exist"

And now, to close out...

Claire's full scale design

Reveal art (2015): Unlike Melody and Allison, I didn't do any sketches to figure out Claire's face before doing the reveal art. I wanted to reveal the game before Christmas and was running out of time, so I just decided to wing it. The end result is a drawing of Claire that I really, truly hate. Everything looks so bad here. Her eyes, the shaping of her hair in the back, the awkward shape of her hat that doesn't really work with the perspective, the weird way her arm bends, the very awkward way I attempted to convey a loose tabard being cinched around her waist. It's all wrong. I did, at least, nail the cow head shape.

Early portrait (2016): I started to improve on Claire's face, hair, and hat in this early draft of the portrait art, but I still had room to improve.

Reveal art revision (2016): When it came time to put out the game's very first trailer, I didn't have time to completely redo the original art of the party, so I just updated it. Everyone was touched up to some degree, but Claire got the most extensive redrawing as I continued to better nail down her design.

Demo key art (2017): This was a MASSIVE breakthrough on Claire's design! Finally, everything clicks. All the details of her face. The taller band on her hat that conforms with perspective better. Her hair draping over her shoulders, giving it more volume, as well as its updated shading scheme that gives it more contrast against her face. Her tabard being flat on her torso, with her belt raised higher. The visible collar. Even the shape of the little tuft of hair on her tail. Everything is right here! Basically every other time I've drawn Claire, I've referred back to this one.

Final portrait (2017): Extremely pleased with Claire's look in the key art, I quickly return to her portrait to reflect those changes to her design.

Profile art (2021): And finally, her profile art! Again, Claire didn't change much past 2017, but her dress did gain a white trim around the bottom.

Closing thoughts

In general, a lot of the weirdness with the early SLARPG art is due to my lack of experience at the time. I wasn't just figuring out how to draw these characters, I was still figuring out how I wanted to draw furries in general - and, hell, I was still figuring out human anatomy after a few years spent mostly drawing simple cartoon characters. Looking at all this art side by side reminds me how much I grew as an artist in my time working on SLARPG. I'm really proud of how far I've come.

And that's a wrap! This one got to be very long, but I think it's a subject worth going into a lot of detail on. As always, thank you to everyone for your continued support, and stick around for more behind-the-scenes deep dives, including one about Jodie at some point!