What time is it? Why, it’s… 71 new dialogue portraits time! Yes, that’s 152% as many faces as the total of what I’ve shown on this blog before today! <3 What can I say? Flora's pretty fast at this drawing thing. =)
Wow, is that a boatload of faces. It fills me with joy just to look at it, especially in full-size. :D And especially especially in the real full-size that only I can see—I can’t upload the full 512×512 resolution here because it would eat my bandwidth alive, so these are the 256×256 versions of each face that I’ve used in previous posts. But how many faces is it? Let’s run down the increased numbers (aside from Summer and Spring):
- Leaf: 11 faces -> 18
- Celty: 7 faces -> 15
- Recca: 4 faces -> 8
- Jelia: 10 faces -> 18
- Ardis: 11 faces -> 13
- Jig: 9 faces -> 17
- Astrid: 13 faces -> 15
- Tango: 11 faces -> 15
- Evelyn: 10 faces -> 13
- Sakura: 14 faces -> 19
- Telia: 16 faces -> 20
- Cecille: 9 faces -> 15
- Kelly: 3 faces -> 5
- Lash: 5 faces -> 8
- Besarre: 3 faces -> 8
- Summer: 5 faces
- Spring: 4 faces
Actually, there are still more finished faces than these, but I left them out because how could I bring myself to reveal spoilers? Nobody wants to know in advance who dies, gets horribly disfigured, turns out to secretly be another character’s sister, cuts their hair to symbolize inner change, gets transformed into a dog, swallows a cake whole, or disguises herself as another character.
(Just kidding. None of those things happen. =P …or do they? Or do some of them?)
Special notes on faces, separated by character:
Leaf previously had not one but two base heads that were each only used for a single expression, so they’ve been repurposed for extra fun.
Celty got a new base head with a few expressions. She’s the character with the most screen time, after all, even though Leaf is the game title name-dropper, so she needed a little variety. =)
Along with Jelia, Jig got the biggest face count upgrade, nearly doubling her faces—which is appropriate since I felt that the faces I’d asked for previously only captured about half of her personality! The new face with her goggles down is one of my favorite additions in the whole collection.
Sakura sure does a lot with her hands—so much that she even makes a cameo interruption in Tango’s portraits! Her new salute and victory sign can actually be used with any of her expressions (and her hand in Tango’s portraits can also be used with any of his), so I only picked two to use as examples.
As embarrassing as it is, I actually forgot that my own Cecille is an elf when giving her description, so her ears have now been updated along with her new faces. Even aside from that, I’d say she gained the most of any character when comparing her current range of emotions to her first draft range, which was a bit one-dimensional.
Similar to Sakura, Lash‘s kunai can now be used with any of her faces.
This is very, very likely to be the last time that I share faces for at least the next several months, so I’ll leave this to stand in its own post. <3 Game development is an ongoing process that often makes great leaps of progress but rarely feels like anything has been finished, especially an entire major component like dialogue portraits—but this feels very complete to me. It might actually be the biggest landmark I’ve had for Dreamblazers to date. =)