Last week, I showcased some of Nobara‘s facial expressions for SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair. Today, it’s Raiko‘s turn!
As you can see, she also retains the expressions you might be familiar with from Broken Beyond Despair, simply getting a much needed visual update. Thankfully, just changing an expression isn’t too much work, so I’ve been able to dish out a few of these in the past two weeks. The goal behind Saku is still to create a shorter project in a much shorter amount of time and in order to achieve that, I really don’t want to go overboard with the sprites and try to keep pose changes at an absolute minimum. Ideally, I won’t even have to draw any, aside from maybe the occasional hand gesture changing, as that’s also something that can be done quick and easy.
However, at the same time, it would also be weird if some of the characters no longer display any of their signature poses from the first game. In Raiko‘s case, for instance, she had the habit of tilting her head when she got curious about something or started thinking. Initially, I wanted to just carry over the expressions alone without the head tilt, but… it just doesn’t feel right.
Thus, I’ve actually started working on said head tilt variation now. To me, drawing a different head perspective is even more difficult than the body changing its pose. You need to get the face and hair to align properly to avoid it it looking weird when changing between the two variations. So if Raiko tilts her head, shifting it a bit to the side, how does her hair fall for example? Do her eyes, nose, mouth, glasses and hairline align correctly? It’s a bit tricky to me.
I mean, thankfully, I have her original BBD sprite as reference, but of course, I gave her a new hair style, so it’s not quite as simple as just fixing the old line art. However, I’m pretty happy with how this head variation is turning out so far and hope to be sharing it soon!
In fact, I’m gonna get right back to working on that, so please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
