Player Character Design - Persephone

The main character of Persephone has gone through many hours of tweaking and changing. I wanted her to be cute, but also cool. I tried to incorporate her earring as best I could into the design. Having her move in a fluid way that didn’t look like a balloon was a challenge but I'm happy with the result.

I spent a lot of time developing my player character. I knew I wanted the player character to be a cute cat. There were a lot of sprite examples online but I couldn't find anything that really felt the way I wanted Persephone to feel. Jumping into character design with literally no idea of skill in this area gave me the naivety required to give it a go without knowing how difficult it really would be. Below are some images from the reference material, initial sketches, and then the finals of the player sprites (they're only 16 pixels high so they get pretty blurry when blown up).

I started out with a bunch of reference images and a couple of sketches to try and create a fundamental pose and feel. I wanted a full sprite and not some spindly little cat so the front on image went through a lot of iterations. Some where too thin, some were to fat. Because I needed the full length body on the side profile I also had to balance the size of head carefully. I still might tweak it in the future but for now I am happy with how she looks.