Greetings, Candidates! Today we have a slightly different devlog post, since we'll be talking about Chili Cherry's work during these last few months, giving shape and form to our fellow priestesses in their very first sprites.

Even though the characters already have an established image, translating them to a different format often involves changes, compromises and expanding upon what's already been built, to the point that it brought up fundamental lore questions that had not yet been answered such as what was the color of Valtan's areolas. Let's take a look at our most holy companions.

Nash & Claw

These were the two first characters of the bunch to be given motion. While Claw could reuse the Gaanidan Candidate's body, Nash required a complete manual recoloring, as minor changes to color and illumination didn't have a natural result.

The Tiger-girl, in contrast, mostly required efforts on her hair and animal parts. Her expression during the animation was also reworked, since the usual happy, cheery face most of the other characters share made her look as if she had been possessed by an alien spirit of good fortune.

  

Valtan

The Shapeshifter's design discussion was focused on how much do slimegirls shine, which was a question we could only solve objectively by observing them by ourselves in their natural habitat: anime. And so we spammed our communications channel with endless shots of slimegirls and slimeboys and slime monsters and slime meals from various media, and concluded that healthy, well fed slimes shine, and shine a lot.

Padmiri

The Leirien required a compromise in the amount of elements that would be depicted about her design: it isn't the same to choose for her to have a wealth of decorative elements when she's going to appear in a static image, than when each and every of those elements is going to require to be given movement.

The bulk of her hair and the not-so-hanging elements of her flora could be faithfully respected, unlike the vines that fall more carefree through the rest of her body. The back of her hair required an original design, since there's not enough of a reference in her portrait.

Ate

And finally, we get to Pandora's box. This was the most challenging character of them all, since Ate's body was made with textures from real photos, involves contrasts between very dark and very light tones, and some of her smallest elements were, at first, blurred to irrelevancy on the first transformation from illustration to sprites.

There was a laborious process of trying new approaches and making new iterations until she reached a satisfactory result, where the hair was harmonious, the edges of the skin did in fact show a refracting light, the eyes and the mouth were properly visible, and she had a characteristic expression. 

The majority of the sprites are already available in the latest free version. The last sprites to be made public are Padmiri's which will soon come in a patch for Patreon supporters! Supporters of the thid tier will also find access to full resolution images of the source illustrations that were made to make the sprites.

That was it all for today! Chili Cherry was quite happy to have participated in this post, glad to share part of the work that goes into creating her part of the game. I hope you enjoyed it as well!