Character development of the Inquisition Soldier. The long story for a side character :-) (Patreon)

Hello <3

We are excited to give you a sneak peek into the development of our new Inquisition Soldier.

She started as a spontaneous idea while we were designing the new map for version 0.15.0. At first, we simply thought that a small outpost outside the city would fit well with the map. After all, who wants to notice a hostile army only when it's already at the city gates? So, naturally, there have to be soldiers standing guard!

But who exactly would be stationed at this outpost? Since it's a potentially important one, we figured it shouldn't just be regular soldiers. An officer should also be present on-site, so we placed a knight alongside the guards.

However, that alone felt a bit dull. Additionally, we realized this was a great opportunity to highlight a conflict between rival factions within the city: the City Guard and the Inquisition! The Inquisition doesn't trust the City Guard, so they station their own soldier at the outpost! So, we decided to add an inquisitor to the camp as well.

What should this inquisitor look like? She could be a simple soldier, bored by her monotonous guard duty at the outpost. But that sounds boring, right? It’s much more intriguing if she’s a seasoned soldier, frustrated at being assigned to such a dull post! This opens up more storytelling possibilities right away. Was she reassigned as a punishment? Or perhaps the High Inquisitor simply wants a reliable soldier on this important post?

With these thoughts in mind, we created our new soldier. She’s meant to be an experienced, tough fighter, frustrated with her assignment and likely to snap at the player when they first speak to her.

AI-generated images don’t quite fit the style of our game, but they are an excellent tool to convey our vision to our artists. The soldier should be facing the player directly to project a sense of presence and authority. This AI image provided a great pose for that purpose.

Especially when it comes to facial expressions and emotions, AI is a fantastic tool to show artists exactly what we have in mind. The nuances of an emotion can be very difficult to describe. With AI, we can easily generate a series of images and then choose the one that fits best. In this case, we selected this one.

With all this information, our artist created an initial sketch. She turned out to be much more muscular than we had originally imagined! However, after giving it some thought, we really liked the design. It's definitely a good idea to have this type of woman in the game. So now we have a strong Amazon warrior :-)

For such a strong and fierce fighter, we felt her breasts were a bit too small. Additionally, the perfectly round shape wasn’t quite as appealing. Normally, breasts don’t touch unless they’re pressed together by clothing, for example. So, we sketched a few adjustments for the artist to refine.

The requested adjustments were made during the coloring process. Additionally, the nipples were made visible to make the character look a bit sexier ;-)

And thus, the final version of this minor character was created. :-)How do you like her? :-)