Character Design ( Speech Bubbles and Status )

[Razoir]

After playing the amazing demo you the team was able to create, i had a lingering question, is the current character design temporary and will be subject to change or is it definitive ? ( i mean, the character Art in the speech bubbles and such )

As the art style is very different from most other promotional art we got since the start of the campaign, and without trying to be nitpicky, is not very appropriated. For example, Alicia seems like a woman in her late twenties while her speech, behaviour, background and promotional art all seem to indicate that she's at the very most in her mid-late teens. ( I'd say 16 or 17 ? ). The Art is very light and as such the characters do not seem to have any redeeming features and i only recognise them by their hair color. I believe the promotional art we got in the kickstarter campaign seem like it'd work better.

The Environment Art though, is stunning. That's something i want to say. This is amazing work.

Now i might be wrong about all this, and by no means i want to , it's only my opinion, and i'd be glad to hear yours !

[James Closs]

I noticed that too, and had forgotten that I had wondered the same sort of thing.

[Alonso Martin]

Yeah, there's a difference between some characters in the game and promotional art, Alicia especially. That's partly because we only started doing promo art last year and this game began back in 2007-ish, where Alicia was originally going to be around her '20s rather than her late teens. At this point it'd be hard to replace all of the in-game avatars with the promo art style, but maybe if there's enough time in the future we can do something about it. I personally am kind of married to how Alicia looks in her in-game portraits, so that'd be a tough darling to kill ^^;

[James Closs]

It makes more sense that she's in her mid-20's to me, but it is a bit of a visual disconnect.  Though it's not as bad as the difference between the Mega Man 1 box art for NES http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Mega_Man_1_box_artwork.jpg

When it gets closer to launch, and if you have the funds, it might be worthwhile to get some new art made just so people aren't expecting one thing and seeing another in the game.  It's one of those first impression things that can stick in people's minds.  And in case you're concerned about backers not being on board with the shift in concept art, I can relate the story of how folks responded to some the much grander shifts in design that occurred during Massive Chalice's development, and there were dissenters at first, as there always will be, but in the end the great majority realized that they had made the correct turn in the project.  And it wasn't small things:  They changed the visual profile of the chalice itself and dropped a whole starting character class.

And like I said, a mid-20's age makes more sense to me for Alicia anyhow.

[Alonso Martin]

Hehe. You have to know the whole story to see why Alicia happens to be in her late teens. Definitely not something that can be changed.

Anyway, maybe it's just me and the way I grew up with games, but I was never upset by the difference between the cover art and the in-game characters in older videogames. Nowadays technology has made it much more possible for in-game characters to look 100% like their promo art counterparts, but back when pixels were the industry standard there was only so much you could cram into sprites to suggest detail, and it was kind of fun to compare the box art with the pixel characters. Maybe it's because spritework requires you to use your imagination to fill-in the missing detail? Don't know.

[Ghidra]

It makes more sense that she's in her mid-20's to me, but it is a bit of a visual disconnect.  Though it's not as bad as the difference between the Mega Man 1 box art for NES http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Mega_Man_1_box_artwork.jpg

That Mega Man box art gets a lot of flack, but I've always appreciated it.  The contrast between the cover and the in game graphics might be severe, but there have been times when playing the game that the box art gave me a grander sense of understanding of what the world of Mega Man might actually look like--that is, if I was there walking around myself.  Somehow I came up with a notion of a futuristic version of Athens inhabited by robots, but don't ask me how I connected the dots in that way--a child's imagination can be a powerful thing.

It's also interesting to consider that the above image is perhaps how the developers at Capcom originally envisioned Mega Man before he became a blockbuster hit and was streamlined into this:
http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/megaman/images/a/a6/MM10-MegaMan.png/revision/latest?cb=20100720141331