The Final Prize is Soup: Character Design (2)
First heroine - Cheng Yanxu
Our Spooktober entry, The Final Prize is Soup, released recently at the start of October.
You who are unqualified to drink Meng Po's soup, you have been chosen for the game of life. Three worlds, three rounds. Win all three and you may avert your fated death. Lose any and your bones are forfeit for tomorrow's lunch broth.
Good luck. Our ghosts have prepared their takeout containers, all plastic, non-microwaveable.
—A survival-horror yuri visual novel.
Let’s talk a bit more about character designs!
Meet Cheng Yanxu (程燕栩), also known as Mimi (咪咪), one of two heroines in our newest visual novel.
A woman in her mid-20s. Our protagonist’s ex-girlfriend, a gloomy and introverted pretty girl who seems very attached to her cellphone.
visual design
Throughout the game, she wears a black cat hoodie over a pink dress—a semi-pastel goth attire. Frills and jirai-kei fashion would suit her!
For her day job, she would wear a more plain outfit, but these are her casual clothes.
The key points about Yanxu’s design:
extra color in her hair! (self-explanatory)
girlish quietness! (a slightly gloomy vibe but she is doing her best)
kitty cellphone case! (a cat motif, like her nickname)
From the oldest sketches of Yanxu’s design (pen on paper the oldest), you can see that much of her design was set quite early on: hairstyle, jacket, dress, cat phone!
Initially, I contemplated giving her dyed strands of hair in her bangs, but for ease of drawing, the dyed hair was moved to the back.
You might’ve noticed the messy note “maybe no jacket” in the old pen on paper sketch, but I decided to keep the hoodie for a bit more of a cozy look. (Though it’s never quite mentioned in game, the story takes place in autumn!)
Although the neck area of the dress was modified from a collar to a turtleneck look, her dress kept a relatively simple look for ease of drawing given that this was a jam game!
I hope I still conveyed her cute-femme and slightly gloomy vibes. (I want to see her in a frilly outfit too…!)And the kitty phone case is a kitty phone case all the way through! (Although she got a phone strap to attach to it once I iterated on the case a bit)
What about colors?
Unless particularly plot necessary, I don’t usually think too much about colors when drawing my initial sketches. Thus, I had quite an adventure deciding the palette while making her character sheet.
In another world, she would have a yellow/orange palette with light brown hair!
The main limitations for the cast’s colors were:
There can’t be too much overlap between their main colors.
Their hair colors must be natural or reasonably obtainable (for the human cast).
Even the pink highlight in the back of her hair wasn’t decided until lots of trial and error later. Initially, I tried light blue streaks in her bangs before quickly transitioning to indigo-blue dyed hair in the back.
After lots of experimentation with the colors for her outfit, I ultimately went back up and added the pink.
Color, what a thing!
My daughter is doing her best…!
It seems that she’s more expressive around our protagonist Hailu…
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How did Yanxu die? Why is she also in this strange and cruel series of death games?
If you haven’t played The Final Prize is Soup yet, please do check it out! (o´▽`o)
shino