Now, let’s be serious. We have to talk about elves. And about Agatha. And other characters, too! This is a post about the cast of WINTERSANDS and how we found them, our stars.

Picrew magic for WINTERSANDS by Ami

I NEED A HERO

The story needs its heroine. As we said before, WINTERSANDS is a reboot and remake of a plot concocted by a teenage mind. More than that, Agatha was not the chief protagonist of that old story, and though it might seem improbably now, there wasn’t much to build her from. For the visual novel, she needed a distinct look – and personality. 

And that personality must be flexible, you know? Agatha should be able to take different turns along her journey, while remaining herself (like Commander Shepard in Mass Effect). That is no small matter.

Mary Sue much? Nope! Agatha is not a mirror reflection of one of us, but some traits or quirks for her and other characters are painted from life.

It turned out in the process of writing that there’s no need to revamp her personality for various choices. Luckily, a three-dimensional person can quite authentically react to complex situations in a number of distinct ways. Here’s what it looks like in the first choice you get to make in the demo:

Dark red for cool-headed; orange for warm-hearted; red for explosive

No matter which temper you choose, Agatha’s invariably straightforward and emotive. To convey that, we abandoned an en face icon that looked straight at the player. Symmetry takes away some from expression, and expression is life!

The long, long, long way to the icon

The demo already has 45 facial expressions for Agatha (and the total of 135 icons, given her casual, Assembly, and armour looks). And the farther we venture into these woods, mountains or Cities, we’ll only have more of those – and other characters.

We dramatised as much as we could! The Lion King movie has reliably shown that micro-expressions are not really appreciated :^)

GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL!

A relatively hard time was to be had with other WS characters, too. Apart from the Keepers, we basically had one other elf, Sandris, and a bunch of tumbleweed left over from the original story. We needed more people! And elves.

Where does one get those, though? The ‘shopping list’ approach (need a villain, need a side-kick, etc.) wasn’t working for us. To take it from the character’s dynamics with Agatha is a whole another thing, however, and that’s what works. Especially if we’re talking love story dynamics.

Couldn’t resist remaking this Sailor Moon shot

So, for a new elf, we started off the one we had originally, Sandris. Agatha’s going to have a zesty love-hate story with this one, so we needed to invent someone who’d be different – both in terms of his own personality and potential feels and naughty shenanigans with our Keeper of Fire. 

I’m taking this one. Do you have any others I could see?

In the original WS story, Sandris did have a rival in love by the name of Helios: a classic, blonde, polite and very serious Legolas. Which is, ugh, not cool, and ‘produces absolutely no vibrations’ © (Oscar Wilde). His name, too, came unacceptably from Ancient Greek mythology, so a makeover was in order.

A new name, some of the appearance and profession came soon enough – soon, we decided he’d be called El (Eliris), he’d have white hair (in contrast to Sandris’s black), and he’d be a doctor (who doesn’t love a uniformed man).

One of the attempts to make El different gave him a mohawk and tattoos like he was a proper Avatar Na’vi. To make a rough and tough righteous boy, though? Nah, thanks. We’re not making an anime, where you have a straight-A nerd and then this guy who’s only function is to scream and fight everyone:^)

El’s personality eluded us for a long time. Eliris 1.0 was a boring type: a smart (almost wise, yuk!) serious doctor who spends days and nights researching the pandemic that plagues the City and is ready to sacrifice the last shirt off his back for a good cause… and one that isn’t fan service.

What, and flash your upper bod?! Over my dead body, you perv!

j.s.: Thank gods my imagination operates as an incubator of sorts. If my search for an image or concept continues as a background process, the idea does come sooner or later. Such epiphanies are much more interesting to me than premeditated and thought-through concepts, because they have feeling. And El did arrive.

Somewhere under the exhaustion and annoyance you’ll see in the demo hides an alfus ludens – the playful elf who loves a challenge no less than Agatha

There’s a number of ways a new character might crop up. Sometimes, it’s an image, a look. That’s how we got the sulky aristocrat Erin Waime. Believe it or not, but he was born out of the idea that jug ears with this sort of Ezra Miller Fantastic Beasts haircut could look cute together. Because they do!

And he’s always dressed to impress, which is pure sinful fan service for the creators

In the demo, Agatha’s ex-tutor Watto Hallikin jokes that she just wouldn’t get his name right, insisting on calling him ‘Hal’ (her fave uncle’s name). The secret is that Watto as a character was born from that name! He was inspired, of course, by Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s Henry IV.

So-o, there’s no one way to come up with a character. Even when you have them, you don’t always know what sort of person they are. But, give them time – and they’ll crash the party in your head when you least expect them, with their own unique dialogue lines that say more about them than a preconceived list of traits.

Then you start drawing them, in the flesh – or the spirit? You start drawing the sprites, and on that, see you next time!

‘A’ is for ‘awesome’