#9 Designing characters

In Exographer, two types of character were to be distinguished: the Natitans, repositories of knowledge and inspired by real scientists who discovered elementary particles (see devlog #4), and Ini, the player character, an exographer sent to investigate a mysterious distress signal emitted by the Natitans.

Ini’s design had to be completely different from that of the Natitans. It was quickly decided that he would be smaller than them, and therefore evolve in a world too big for him. This is both a metaphor for our limit-conscious scientific knowledge, and a reference to the titanic machines built by scientists today, for example at CERN (see devlog #1). 

In our early versions, Ini would look like a robot, or even an exploration probe sent to analyze the distress signal and explore an abandoned world.

In the end, we opted for a biological character, a sort of repairman or astronaut, to give the player a stronger sense of identification with the character… New graphic explorations took shape.

One constraint was that the design had to remain fairly simple, since Ini obtains equipment as it goes along, which had to be represented and animated in pixel art, a considerable challenge.

Another constraint was that we wanted the character to be gender-neutral. On this point, we’re disappointed with the result. For us, Ini could be anyone behind his helmet, but we’ve noticed that many players are convinced that he’s a boy, in keeping with the stereotype of the astronaut profession? We’ll do better next time! 

In the case of the Natitans, we wanted to convey the idea of a highly advanced civilization, ancient enough to have accumulated a wealth of scientific knowledge. Our graphic designer Thomas Vaulbert took inspiration from very ancient animal species, such as arthropods, which have existed since the Precambrian period. The first concepts were based on this idea.

But as Exographer production progressed, we felt the need to diversify the look of the Natitans, to better characterize them. So we decided to take inspiration from more recent species, such as a gorilla or an elephant, for the youngest Natitans, in a kind of mini theory of evolution.