So I was asked by some of the others in the dev crew, “How do you decide what to draw?” Most of the work I’ve done for this project so far is the cut-in images (a character image that can be set right on top of a background), so I’ll mention something on that.
About the designs, I’ll usually look at a variety of different sources for inspiration. First stop is the fighting games if the character appears there. I have an easier time getting character personalities from the fighting game portraits, but I do consider the ZUNart for designs, just to not stray too far from the source.
At times though the fanon handles things in a way that I like better than the original sources. For that I’ll root through my picture collection or through Danbooru if I haven’t saved enough of a certain character (you can thank my hard drive space for that) I think the most outstanding design choice of this sort was on Patchouli– while we love our little bookworm all deadpan and snarky, for the sake of character development we wanted her to have a decently wide range of visible emotions. I discovered that it was a lot harder to do so with Patchouli’s normal hair color because it hides the eyebrows pretty well… you know how a lot of anime villains have no eyebrows right? Anyway I changed the hair color to something lighter because of that, and I suspect it’s part of the reason why so much fanart gives her a lighter hair color as well.
That’s all from me for now. I think I can safely say that you guys can see a demo release sometime this summer.