Hey cyberware slingers,
Today, we’re taking a peek behind the curtain to learn a bit about a yet un-demo-ed character: Jupiter! (Warning for mild spoilers.)
This scamp is the youngest character in the game and is part of a youth subculture, dubbed Glamscum. Jupiter is 21, is studying at a local university, and uses he/him pronouns.
Likes: friendship, graffiti, bugs
Dislikes: the capitalist machine that runs society, other’s assumptions, being told how to live his life
Desired mods: either an animated tattoo, floating hair, or pointed ears (he’s not sure which he’d like)
Jupiter was one of the characters we designed quickly, realized we needed to tweak, and then left hanging for months. We recently completed his design, so to celebrate, here’s the full walkthrough of his creation.
First, we started with the concept for Jupiter’s character. We knew we wanted a younger client and that we wanted to explore aesthetic mods that were important to both outward and internal identity. Smash these together and add that he has a tight budget since he’s in school, and voila! We now had a character who would be interesting to learn about. (Plus there’s the graffiti, the fact he works part time at the City’s import docks, his hopes and dreams for the future… There’s a lot to ask him about!)
Some core elements of Jupiter were his idealism, kindness, and naivete. We wanted to make sure that we reflected these in his design.
As with most of our characters in Quality Dreams, Reasonably Priced, we started with designing his outfit. It helps us flesh out the personality more, as we consider how a character might dress, what they prioritize in their styling, and how we can use the outfit to express their personality.
We settled on the second outfit with a mix of elements from a few others. The outfit felt free and full of energy. It also lacked some of the try-hard or sporty vibes of the other options, which we decided didn’t fit the character as well.
Next, Nez sketched out variations to help us settle on Jupiter’s hair and posture.
From there, we moved to fully rendered sketches of both the character’s poses (with some tweaks along the way).
Then, I finished writing his scene, and we realized that Jupiter needed to be a lot less clean-cut and a lot more punk. (This is where we ended up pausing work on him for quite some time.)
More recently, Nez returned to the character and sketched proposed outfit changes on top of the current design.
Which, after some tweaking...
...became Jupiter’s new final design! (As seen above.)
Almost all of our characters have changed a bit during the writing process, but Jupiter is the only one who’s changed drastically enough to need a redesign. His original design was still something he could wear (especially if trying to clean up for an important appointment), but we felt like it didn’t meld well with his core values.
Jupiter desperately wants to be authentic and not to let others dictate his identity. We wanted this to reflect more clearly in his clothes, so we needed to move a bit further away from the good-boy vibes of his first outfit. The vibes are still there (as you can probably see haha), but now they’re presented in a different flavour.
Jupiter is a delightful character to write. He brims with enthusiasm, passion, and optimism. We hope that you love him as much as we do!
As always, thank you so much for your interest and support in Quality Dreams, Reasonably Priced. It means the world to us and it helps us out immensely! 💛
If you haven’t wishlisted the full game yet, please please do so. (And please bother other people you know to wishlist it haha) We live and die at the whim of the Steam algorithm, and she is fed with wishlists.
Also, if you liked this style of update, please let us know! We can do more of these for other characters if so :)