Last time we promised the shy lich and the hungry staff. Here they are, and here's how they went from a page of horned doodles to the character in the game.
Mori is a lich. Not the tower-of-skulls, end-of-the-campaign kind. She's the kind who got the title before she was ready for it. She keeps her eyes hidden behind her bangs, flinches at loud noises, and would honestly prefer that the humans invading the dungeon just went home.
Gula is her staff. Gula has opinions. Gula has an appetite. Gula has a mouth, and the mouth is most of Gula. Where Mori hesitates, Gula lunges. If it falls in the dungeon, Gula wants to eat it.
They take up a single roster slot because neither works alone: Mori is the only one who can hold Gula, and Gula is the only reason Mori ever moves forward.
That push and pull is the whole design. Every stage below is us trying to make it readable in a single silhouette.
We started from the lich half. The goal at this point wasn't a finished look. It was to find the one or two things that would say "shy" and "undead" before anyone read a line of text. So the first pages cast a wide net: different headpieces, different props, different things for her to sit on.
Two decisions came out of it. Her eyes went under her bangs and stayed there. A character who won't look at you says "shy" without a word. And her hair became soul-fire.
We also cut everything that pushed her toward "demon." The demon in this pair is the staff, not Mori, and anything on Mori that competed with the staff for attention went with it.
First two sketches.
Exploration sheet.
The first full render. The goal here was to lock Mori's silhouette and make sure she reads as someone carrying the staff, not wielding it. Everything about her posture is held back.
Gula stopped being a decoration here. The staff head became a mouth, all big teeth. Its color is still blue at this stage; that gets its own decision later.
Here's the hard problem. How do you pose a character who doesn't want to be in the frame?
We drew about twenty attempts. In most of them one of the two took over the picture: either Mori hid so well that the character disappeared, or Gula got so big that Mori turned into a prop.
The ones that worked all shared one thing: Mori's body going one way and Gula going the other. The version we kept has Mori braced and pulling back while Gula lunges forward off the end of the staff. Two opposite vectors, one silhouette. You don't need the character sheet to see who's driving.
Pose roughs, 1 to 10.
Pose roughs, 11 to 20.
The design was locked, but Gula still read as a prop on a stick. The goal of this stage was easy to say and hard to draw: make Gula feel alive. Greedy, restless, straining off the end of the staff toward the nearest thing it could eat. Mori's whole personality is in how little she moves, so Gula has to carry all the motion for both of them.
The effect itself is Gula swallowing. Whatever is in front of that mouth gets pulled in, and the work was about making that pull, and that appetite, read from across the screen.
We did it in two passes. The first was in color, nine variants, to find how much and how far. The second dropped the color and went back to greyscale, six more variants, to fix the silhouette alone: color is easy to change later, a weak silhouette isn't. Along the way Gula's effect turned green. Blue is Mori, her hair and her stillness. Green is Gula, and whatever it's about to take. Now you can tell at a glance which of the two is acting.
First pass, in color. Nine variants.
Second pass, greyscale, silhouette only. Six variants.
The approved art. Compared to the first render, every change is in service of the pose: the skirt got shorter so her legs could carry it, and the details were tightened around that one idea. Mori holds back. Gula, mouth open, takes whatever is in front of it.
To close, the in-game SD version and its animations: idle, walk, and attack, Gula's skill from rough animatic to colored frames to the final version, and the small Gula that fires as a trigger skill.
Idle, walk, attack.
Skill: rough animatic, colored frames.
Skill: final version.
Trigger skill: small Gula.
Mori & Gula is the squad's mage. Highest attack on the roster, lowest health. Mori really will fall over if anything gets close, so she fights from behind Minos.
Gula's hunger is a stat. Kills feed Gula, and a fed Gula hits harder. If you see skills called Chomp, Ravenous Feast, or Carrion Feast, you know whose they are. Mori's own contributions are the flinch-and-retaliate kind: she mostly gets stronger by being startled.
If a timid lich carrying a staff that wants to eat the enemy sounds like your kind of thing, wishlisting DPS on Steam genuinely helps us. And if you have a favorite among the twenty pose sketches, tell us in the comments. A couple of us still miss one that didn't make it.
— Detailgames team