SHIMMERWITCH.SPACE

Asterism

Full Moon
Dev Blog #12

7 March 2023

Three Rubies

For months now I've known who the protagonist of Asterism is and roughly what she looks like, and I've been using a very early placeholder sketch to represent her visualy in the game. Since I'm updating a lot of the art at the moment it seemed like the right time to design her properly. So in this blog post I'm going to talk about the iterations she's gone through so far!

Does she have a name?

Yes! Though I've changed it several times and have almost made a final decision...

Many moons ago when I was bored with a friend at work we came up with drag names for ourselves. Mine was 'Ruby Galaxus', and apparently that's still what I'm saved as in my friend's phone contacts. For a while I also thought maybe 'Ruby Galactica' would be cool but then remembered that Battlestar Galactica exists, which really I haven't watched enough of to form a drag persona around. These two names stuck in the back of my head for a few years until I began working on Asterism and decided I needed a cool space name for the main character. When I returned to these names I tried simplifying the surname a bit, maybe just to 'Ruby Galaxy'. But, that sounds more like a place than a name to me (in fact, some deep Asterism lore is that a lot of game decisions after that came from finding this Nasa article). So, I thought maybe 'Ruby Galaxii' sounded better, and ties in with the fact that there are 12 (XII) songs on the album. That's where I'm at now, but I've been swithering a lot on this so who knows, maybe it will change again.

That's a longer answer than I was expecting! So, what does Ruby look like?

I'm glad you asked, as I've prepared a number of images to show you!

I didn't have much of a visual in my head for Ruby at first, and it wasn't until I started prototyping some levels and decided to make the game third-person that I sat down to sketch something I could use as a placeholder for her in the game. I wanted her to be kind of obscured, as though she's hiding, but still looks like she's ready to go somewhere, in space. This is the first 2-frame animation I drew of Ruby from an over the shoulder view. You can't really see much of her at all, and the space helmet cuts her off from the outside world further. I like how minimal it is, and in early testing people often commented that they liked how she looked too, so I did keep some of this general vibe as I moved forward.

I used this placeholder for several months of development, until I started re-doing the art of the first few levels recently. I did some sketches to redesign Ruby and make her appearance more detailed, and looked at a lot of futuristic fashion for inspiration and created a moodboard of sillhouettes to work from. A couple of other inspirations I had, that I think were more subconscious than conscious after looking back at the design, were The Little Prince, and the Ghibli character Nausicaä, particularly for thinking about the colours.

Again I used this new design in the game for a while as placeholder, and it was amazing what a difference it made even without being animated yet.

For the full game I plan to have a different visual for Ruby in each level, to match the art style for that location. So far I have 3 Rubies in different styles completed, which will be in the demo version of the game that I'll be playtesting soon.

The first of these is for the song 'Hemisphere', which is located on an icy planet. The art style is mostly card and paper using 2D billboarded sprites, so to stay consistent with that I used a cardboard base for all of Ruby's animation frames. I tried a few materials for colouring (crayons, felt tips, pencils etc.) and found that coloured chalks give a really nice texture and roughness that feels like the image is in motion. I used this with a combination of sharpie outline for each frame, then cut them out before photographing them.

For another song 'Contours', the art style is origami and papercraft. I used instructions from Jun Maekawa's book Genuine Origami to fold an origami version of Ruby. I did this all in blue initially, and then marked out which areas should be different colours. Then I unfolded her, and used tracing paper to get the shapes of those sections, glued them onto the blue origami sheet and re-folded it. It was pretty fiddly but turned out really well!

For the third Ruby, I wanted to make a fabric-based puppet that would fit in with the diorama level that I wrote about in my last blog. This was a lot of fun and I was able to use a lot of bits and pieces I had lying around the house, such as kitchen sponges, scraps of felt, and a marble. I'm very excited about how this one looks in the game, but I won't share that just yet! Here's a sneak-peek though!