I had the good luck, back in 2016, of being part of the excellent team making Numizmatic Games’ Nintendo Switch release Light Fingers, as the concept artist, and worked on character designs for the player characters. Here’s some snippets of our process!

Above you can see the final player character lineup, not by me, featuring nice renders of the models. Roach wasn’t part of this particular process, but you’ll see him in another post!

All the 2D art that follows is by me:

We spent a lot of time casting a wide net for the four player characters – we knew we needed variety, but they also had all feel like sneaky or nimble adventurer thieves! We did a lot of mix and matching, taking aspects from various concepts and bringing them together in the next batch of interations:

At this point we had a sense of the first two characters, Caper and Dagg, so it was time to clean them up for the modellers:

We started brainstorming colours next, a combo of working on the 2D images, and pulling the colours into the 3D environment using a custom tool the devs built for me:

We still needed two more player characters, so it was back to the drawing board:

Tricks made it into the game, but our friend in the fur vest ended up getting swapped out for Roach, who actually came into being from the NPC design process!

Hubert made us this lovely gif of the design process of Caper, so you can see how each stage led to the next: