Life Witch started out as, well, not a witch at all. She was for some reason an angry looking girl in a profane sweater:
In essence, a random doodle born out of boredom. In a distant corner of my mind, I drew inspiration from the scarf from Stretch Panic, though I've never played it. But, I've always liked the idea of a sentient scarf. This doodle was quickly abandoned until a few months later around the beginning of my senior year at SCAD. To better realize the potential of the scarf, I explored a messenger type character with an animal-like mask:
The idea was to create a somewhat creepy character hidden behind a mask, arms tied behind their back, and a scarf that would therefore act as their arms. The more hidden her actual arms were, the better. I didn't have much time to explore many character designs and thought this was a good enough start, so used this design for my Senior Studio project pitch:
This quick illustration got the reaction I wanted, so I continued to explore the design further. Shorts turned into a bewitching dress, and the cat tail turned into a giant bow. Before I knew it, she had gone from a messenger to a witch:
I tried to carefully think how exactly the different layers of her clothing would work. The most important thing was to hide her actual arms. The giant bow in the back helps to disguise them, and the poncho completes the transformation. The scarf also features a gradient to make the scarf wrapped around her neck and the scarf acting as her hands seem unrelated, an attempt to further the illusion. I tried not to worry about style at this stage, and more so focused on her outfit's functionality. Once I was happy with it, I tried to render her in the style I wanted:
At this point, I decided to remove the mask from her face and instead wear it atop her head, simply because I ended up liking her face. A weak reasoning perhaps, but a decision that was made nonetheless. Her character went from creepy, to creepy cute, and cute is always a good thing. I also decided to lose the scarf wrapping around her neck and decided to go with a scarf wrapping style that drapes closer to the body. Might as well show off her beautiful neck scar, right? With a style I was generally happy with, I then went on to creating a turnaround for our character artist (Hank), which required several different iterations (which I've combined into a GIF):
Eventually she was modeled:
And rigged:
And she lived a happy life. A short, sweet, life. Until one day, several months after her completion, our professor in charge of our Senior Studio class said that she had a weak silhouette. We must have had bigger fires to put out with our project that he didn't notice Life Witch for a while (heck, we didn't even notice). At first, we were like:
But he was right. Because of the angle of the game, her details were pretty hard to make out:
She unfortunately looked like a walking sack. There was no way around it at this point, her poncho needed to be removed, the one thing I thought was integral to making her mysterious and hiding her real arms. Because of how many other things we needed to do, I had to come up with a quick fix solution that would not take away from other parts of production. I decided to take a render of the current model and alter her from there:
Thankfully, our character artist modeled her actual arms the first time, in case we ever needed them free. So I deleted the poncho geometry, revealed her arms, and took her scarf to the next level. Our professor was much happier with this design, and she looked better in game as well:
Still a little hard to make out, but better. For a senior project completed in 9 months, and considering all the other problems we ran into and overcame, I think she came out quite well. Like I said in the beginning, I'm extremely proud of how she turned out, her design, and overall quality. Here she is fully textured and posed:
And below is her official turnaround from our character artist himself:
Well, that's the end of her journey for now! It's refreshing to look back and see how far she's come. I'm hopeful that she will be revived in a future project one day, maybe even Bala itself. Until then, I'm working on environment stuff for Prisma. I have some character projects on the side, one of which I should be able to reveal very soon. Until then, rest in pieces Life Witch!!
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