Crystal Core Character Concept Collection

After noticing the unintentional alliteration in the previous titles, I decided to go all in on this one.

it may be a bit of a surprise compared to the last three pictures I posted, but while working on The Crystal Core, I did work on things other than crystals. In fact, I did some very early concepts for all the main characters, most of which I smooshed all together into this one big collage. Which, granted, is a cluttered mess, but this mess is the least bad way I could think of to present it all, because I couldn't see much or any of it being worth seeing on its own otherwise. As such, opting for quantity over quality was my solution. It's not perfect, but for those like myself who enjoy seeing the design process right down to the many tiny variations that get drawn on the way to a final design, and especially for those who say I should post more sketches instead of mostly just finished stuff, I have uploaded this ugly mess. Enjoy!

As for the actual content itself here, these are sketches of four characters. The floating heads are the main friendly NPC Alex, and his evil reverse-named twin Xela, the villain of the game. Aside from friendly blue and evil red/purple being a clue, the expressions also differentiate who's who. Also it's mostly Alex on the left and Xela toward the right. The drawings are almost exclusively heads because in-game, they were intended to appear as floating holographic heads, so I was just working on their heads and holographic appearance concepts to start with. Also, I want to note that the five red Xela heads in the middle-right weren't drawn by me, I just did the coloring and ideas for how to make his hologram look visually corrupted, in keeping with his being an evil glitchy AI.

Aside from Alex, I also did a little, very tentative work on the player characters, who are situated at the top-middle-ish area, clearly differentiated by looking much younger and having actual bodies. Whereas I worked on Alex and Xela for a while, another artist quickly took over player character work, so those are the only sketches I did of those two, who went on to a pretty different direction afterwards. But still, if you enjoy seeing the early designs that never were, there they are.

And with that, whether you enjoyed these sketches or now agree with my reluctance to share sketches more often, this submission has done its job.