Art Style and Character Design

      Morgan was the first character written for of the Devil, and since she was also the first character that we designed, her design established the boundaries and needs that our art style would come to fulfill.

      Back before it was even a short story, the initial idea centered around a lawyer walking into a police station late at night to speak to a man accused of a crime. As that concept evolved into a story, then a script, then a game, Morgan’s personality stayed strong, but her appearance began to change. The character had to adapt to the growing responsibilities that their design would need to shoulder. 

      Morgan needs to convey a number of things to the audience the first time they look at her. They should see that she is intelligent, organized, energetic, and professional- and most importantly, they should see that she is the protagonist. Her initial design had dark pink hair in a messy ponytail. This worked fine on paper- or rather, in words- But it was difficult to get the ponytail to a size where it didn’t melt into her silhouette while still looking professional, and her hair color, while “punk-y” and unique, could get lost amidst the dark alleys and neon soaked streets of our setting. As we experimented with a number of other warm colors, we looked to other media and took note of the common features that their protagonists shared.

      We saw a lot of cowlicks and spiky hair. Iterating on this, we tried an updo-, literally trying to flip the script on the ponytail that wasn’t coming together yet. The new hairstyle had a professional look, but ended in sharp, energetic spikes that gave Morgan a youthful and lively impression. We chose a soft “carnation” red for her color palette to give her a heroic, leading-lady quality that looked good against both deep black shadows and vibrant neon lights.

Personality and Narration

      Morgan’s personality takes inspiration from a wide range of characters and archetypes. While the “Detective” in a murder mystery can come from any number of backgrounds and can have any number of quirks, all mystery-solvers have one thing in common: They’re a bit mean. Extreme examples like Sherlock Holmes are snooty, arrogant, antisocial, and uptight- others like Columbo or Poirot are just deceptive and playful- But they are all, at the end of the story, Right. And being right all the time, they tend to have pretty big egos.

      Morgan’s darker attributes are on full display for the reader because she’s directly narrating the story. We aren’t seeing Morgan from the eyes of a Watson character, following her around wide-eyed and innocent, balking at her jumps in logic. Instead we walk alongside her internal monologue throughout the entire story, private witnesses to the sharp tongue and cynicism she only occasionally bares at the rest of the cast. To help reinforce this gap between her “inner voice” and outward friendliness, we colored her eyes black during many of her internal tangents. Combined with dimming the lights in the background, this helps signal to the player that we are not reading her thinking in real-time, and that she isn’t leaving long awkward gaps in the conversation- Except when she wants to.

Synthesis

      For the majority of my time writing ‘of the Devil’, I hadn’t decided on a name for the protagonist. I knew that I liked Morgan as a last name though, so I just kept going with that. Every character she met referred to her by her last name. And over time, that became a pretty large part of her character- That despite her charm and friendliness and communication skills, she still wasn’t on a first name basis with anyone in the cast. A gap between her and the others that I had originally intended to fill in later, instead became a key part of her personality and how she relates to the people she meets in the story. 

      On a similar note, I had already written all of Morgan’s lines by the time @evillittlebug started working on the sprite art and emote variations. Because of this, we had a strong vision of what emotional highs and lows the character’s design would need to accommodate, and we didn’t waste any time on unnecessary assets. But there was another, unforeseen side effect- after the sprite art was done and I saw all of Morgan’s facial expressions, I was taken aback by how charming the art looked even when she was flustered, irritated, or mad. It made me want to go back and find more opportunities to show off those facial expressions. 

      As I increased the frequency with which Morgan could be made to sweat or lose her temper, her personality began to change. As she got irritated more often, the character became more irritable. So a character that I considered “fully-formed” began to evolve further still, all because of our artist’s skill in depicting emotion. It led to a more complex, multifaceted personality- A Morgan that wasn’t always so firmly in control of the conversation, and most importantly, a Morgan that was even more of a joy to watch on-screen.