More Time For Slime

Let's take another look at Akello's slime development.  In the beginning when I started planning his chapter, I wasn't sure if I would need a formal monster sprite to stand alone against his human one but as I got deeper and deeper into development it started to become clear that he would need something more.  For one, his main menu screen looked quite bare without a secondary figure.

Atlas and I convened and we talked about increasing the amount of goo coming off him.

As usual, ferrofluid was kind of the inspiration for the material look of Akello's slime... i think the variation between hard and soft shapes was really important to convey the fact that he could be more rigid or fluid based on what he needs.

Atlas was real particular about weight and movement distribution of the lines around Akello's body so they inked and built off Akello slowly and in very deliberate stages to make sure things stayed balanced and coherent.  A lot of the danger of a character that turns into slime is that you can lose a lot of intelligent design details if you're too heavy handed with the liquid/fluid side of things.  Obviously, Atlas had an expert handle on that pretty early on and it really shows as they proceeded through the lineart stage.

One of the things Atlas was particularly invested in was the line of movement through the figure as it draws the eye in.  Because the slime sprite is SORT of the same shape and size as the human sprite, we wanted to make sure that the way the focus spots appeared to the viewer felt at least semi in line with where they would naturally fall with Akello's human form

Once satisfied with the balance, Atlas moved ahead with inking the rest of the form.

And finally, Atlas took another crack at refining Akello's slimey face, which personally I ADORE.

Atlas also got color onto Akello's slime in a way that looks so incredibly satisfying and I'm excited to share.  I actually loved the pallette so much I ended up overhauling a good deal of the chapter's UI to match.  I knew I wanted some shade of green to be Akello's image colors (i really like that each character has strong color associations and wanted to continue that).

And atlas checking in on the discord patrons:

My answer is yes.

Next time, I'll show you the more finalized pieces. :D