Lead Character Artist Katie talks about how they approached designing a city’s worth of characters for our upcoming game The Hearth and Harbour
I’m Katie, character and prop artist at Saltstone Studios.
Creating The Hearth and Harbour has pitted our team against one of game dev’s many challenges: how to create a city that feels alive and real. Moreso, how do we do this with a tiny team?
Our game is set in a fictional city and for it to feel believable, we need a cast of characters that are distinct, purposeful and connected without exceeding the limits of our time and resources.
Big cast. Lively City. Small team. How do we do this??
1: So… How many characters is ‘enough’?
We must balance scale and feasibility.
- Too few characters = empty barren city
- Too many characters = unmanageable development
Our solution is perceived density as opposed to raw quantity! Not every citizen we see needs equally deep storylines or complex systems. Instead, we prioritise:
- A core cast w/ depth and narrative weight [Vendors]
- A supporting cast that reinforces the world through presence and interaction [Patrons/NPCs]
- Background characters that add ‘body’ through their presence throughout the city and association with other characters [Entourages]
Layering these categories means we can make the city feel lively without needing each character to carry equal weight and complexity.
2: Functional Roles vs Social Identities
We want our city and cast to feel diverse and distinct. Each district (or neighbourhood) carries its own identity; encompassing cultural tone, economic status and social dynamic. This allows us to reuse visual motifs and narrative context to associate characters with districts of Lewthport. Each has its own architecture, fashion and social norms, but not all individuals will conform… Some will embrace their environment, others will push against it. (The characters are shaped by where they live but not fully defined by it!!) This grounds characters in a believable context, enables environmental storytelling and allows for contrast and tension within a single area of the game.
We also group characters by their societal and mechanical roles.
- Vendors/Service providers with a functional role in-game (eg. Fishmonger, Cook, Rent Collector)
- NPC Patrons of your restaurant, who embody social identities (Socialite, Criminal, Parent)
- Entourages of the Patrons, who may visit your restaurant with specific NPCs they associate with
- Romanceable characters, who you may (or may not!) be able to develop a deeper connection with….
This structure helps us to distinguish what each character provides mechanically while still allowing for personality and narrative depth.
The city should also exist despite the player. That is, the world should feel alive even when the player isn’t ‘watching’. Characters have regular haunts around the city, their own homes they return to, and relationships with other NPCs. This makes it feel like people have routines, histories and lives beyond player interaction.
Not every character is romanceable, but we have a variety of locals that the player miiight get to progress down unique romance routes with…
3: Diversity of character
As far as character design is concerned, range in silhouette and colour are crucial for readability. However, diversity goes far beyond appearance. We design our cast under the principles of appearance (distinct shapes, clothing, and ‘class style’), personality (mannerisms, behaviour and emotional expression) and motivation (goals, desires and internal conflicts).
Two characters may share traits; eg. the Gossip and the Socialite both look like sociable, wealthy, fashionable young women with strong personalities, but if their mannerisms and motivations differ then they immediately feel distinct! The Gossip is a scandal-loving social climber, where the Socialite is an ambitious business owner. The simple differentiation of these characters allows us to boost variety while we limit production scope.
4: Representation without Tokenism
It is important to us as a team that our large cast is diverse and representative of a realistic society, even in a made-up world based on Edwardian era British Isles. We reject the foolish notion that people of colour did not exist in society in this time period. History is too-often whitewashed and it would be a disservice to our story not to include complex and varied ethnic identities.
We aim to avoid tokenism by ensuring characters have agency beyond their identity, their traits are integrated, not isolated, and they exist within relationships and systems, not as standalone symbols. We apply this test to our characters: If you were to remove one aspect of a character’s identity, would they still feel like a complete person? If no, get ur butt back to the drawing board and revisit that design.
Ultimately, our goal is to have a network of people, rather than just a list of characters. Each character connects to others, fulfils multiple roles and exists within a shared system! That interconnectedness is what makes Lewthport feel alive. It’s not about how many characters we have, it’s about how meaningfully they relate to one another!!
Designing a big cast with a small team is definitely a challenge, but by focusing on mechanics, societal structure and personalities, it becomes possible to create a city that feels rich, reactive and full of life without building more than you can sustain :)))
Thank you!
– Katie Noble
FANART FEATURE:
On our blog posts, we share artwork created by our lovely community! We’re so grateful for your passion and support.
Artist: Niko
“Back to the roots of it all.”
If you would like your work featured on our blog and social media, contact me:
Email: jess@saltstonestudios.com
Discord: jessanight
Thanks so much for your support, from The Pale Beyond to The Hearth and Harbour, and hopefully, beyond.
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