BB Vol. 3 Last Design Previews

Well, I overestimated how quickly I could get through the remaining character designs but here they are! With this last batch of characters settled I can begin making proper portraits and sprites, so I'll be summarizing my current plans for the townspeople here.

As mentioned before, I'll be aiming to have support for certain popular expansion mods with my designs, such as SVE, but that's going to vary on a character-by-character basis. Most characters in the game don't quite have enough content to warrant giving everyone a unique pose for every emotion like I've done for the marriage candidates, so most of the more minor characters will have just one or two poses with face variations, while others, mostly those with marriage-oriented expansion mods, will have get the full pose treatment. The characters I'm already certain I'll be providing with full poses would be:

Magnolia (Wizard) - For support with Stardew Valley Expanded and Romanceable Rasmodius

Morrigan (Morris) - For support with SVE and possibly Marry Morris

Krobia (Krobus) - For base game roommate content

Dwarf - For support with The Last Smoluanu

Marlowe (Marlon) - For SVE, possibly for Make Marlon Real (which is incompatible with SVE but the emotions needed may overlap)

A few other characters could be open for consideration, but I have no personal experience with any of their mods or there could be other complications. I know Sandy has an expansion mod called Roses in the Sand, and personally I like the idea of giving her content as one of the most underused characters in the game, but I haven't played with it myself. Caroline has multiple mods that make her marriable, the most popular of which seems to be Childhood Sweetheart Caroline, but I see that that mod comes with its own look for her and many more custom outfits. And there are probably a bunch of other mods I'm not familiar with, I think I'd have to rely on reviews from other players to know which ones are worth providing compatibility for! Do you guys know of any particularly good ones?

With the designs wrapped up, I'll probably start posting these on social media in the future to see if I can get more visibility on the project, while I start making early access builds of the pack available for supporters... but I also do still need to get Maru and Leah done for the Volume 1 redraw pack so I gotta get quite a bit of stuff in order first!

Anyway, here are the designs this time:

Morrigan gets a bunny outfit too to mirror female Pierre, but she's quite a bit more... well-stocked, shall we say. If I had infinite time I'd like to reimagine the scene where Morris steals Pierre's customers into a more direct confrontation drawing emphasis to her overwhelming size advantage, but I have enough on my plate right now...

Morris was always a character I felt was super underutilized in the base game so SVE turning him into a full-fledged character is one of the primary reasons it sticks around in my game and one of the only reasons I pick the Joja route sometimes. Though maybe that last part will have to become "all the time" after this overhaul is complete, heh.

Sandy is similarly an underused character, but she didn't get any content at all for years, official or unofficial, until Roses in the Sand came along... Was featured in that marriage candidate poll that got Emily and Shane added as love interests years ago and then nothin'. So with no swimsuits or winter outfit available her base costume needs to carry all the skimpiness!

I considered giving her a dancer veil to complete the look but I feel like obscuring the face goes against the purpose of portraits, hmm.

Krobus and Dwarf have an oddity about their original sprites, for some reason they only have 54-pixel tall sprite frames as opposed to everyone else's 64-pixel ones, so they were hard-locked into being the shortest characters in the game and the developer of Scale Up Unofficial had to work some coding magic to get them to display high-res sprites properly, so big thanks to them for that!

I wanted to make Dwarf look more like a mischief-making little gremlin, but they only have the one portrait in the base game, which would then also be used for their one cutscene in the game where they fight with Krobus, so I was forced to give them a more neutral look.

I have no idea how difficult it's going to be to render Krobia's gradient hair colors as pixel art, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it...

And finally, they won't be getting detailed previews here, but the pack will have completely safe designs for these three just to make the visual style of everything consistent when the project's all wrapped up.

Well, I say that, but I'm still undecided on the portraits for the characters like Gil, Gunther, Governor, etc. I mentioned last time, who barely even count as characters in the vanilla game... Ah, I'll deal with them later!