Secret Door Club: Roti Wormbeak design diary

Hello Secret Door Club!

Today I wanted to share a little bit of our design process with you. Oftentimes when we sit down to design a character, we know what we want them to look like fairly quickly, and other times... It takes some doing. The last time we wrote about a character's design was Marlon Wallace, who also went through dozens of iterations before we found her final look.

The character whose design we got stuck on this time was Roti Wormbeak, the Cawmac fatworm vendor that shows up in Quest Pack 04. The first sketch I made of him was this:

Charming enough, if a bit dopey. 

The thing is, Roti was going to be the first representation of the Cawmac race (the bird-people that inhabit the Seasong Islands) to appear in our campaign. In our minds, the Cawmacs are majestic and full of splendour, and we realised that this design - based on a ground parrot - just did not embody those qualities. 

So we went back to the drawing board to first figure out what we want our Cawmac people to look like, so we could then use those ideas to redesign Roti in a way that represented our idea of the Cawmacs more clearly.

The first step in this process was to find reference images of birds that we felt embodied the three Cawmac sub-races - The Cacua, the Touka and the Skuku. We gathered them up in a moodboard, to get a good idea of what we've got to work with:

Next, I made a few sets of character sketches to find the most archetypical depictions of those three sub-races. We were also really stuck on what to do with the wings - we knew we wanted the Cawmacs to feel really feathery and fun, but not much else. We decided to try out three different types of wing-arms: 

Talons: Arms with just feathers up to the elbows
Taloned wings: Full wings with talon hands on them
Magical Wings: No talons, and the wings form their hands.

They are drawn here without clothes on so I could focus on their body shapes. 

We felt that the talon hands made them look a little evil and nasty, and we want these birds to look majestic and friendly. So we decided to go with the magical wings!

Finally, we applied these designs to the character of Roti. We decided to make him a Touka!

We're very pleased with the final design, and we're confident that Roti is a good representation of the Cawmacs to come!

~

We hope you enjoyed this insight into our design process. If there are any other parts of our process that you'd be interested in reading about, let us know!

Cheers,
- Niels & Rose