Thread by @LucieViatge

Here's a little thread on the Goodbye Volcano High characters and their design evolution throughout the years 🦕🦖🌿

When @Seemo and @spacetreasured first told me "so the characters are dinosaurs but also they go to high school" I knew it was going to be a difficult balance to reach between relatable teens and cool looking dinos. I drew a lot of weird dino/human mixes.

We settled on mostly human bodies with dino faces and I started sketching the first characters, here you can see the first Fang, Stella, Naser and kind-of-Trish. At first I imagined Naser to be the classic blonde preppy obnoxious prince-like character (a fave trope of mine).

At first I was very torn on hair. I absolutely wanted my dinos to be feathered, but it felt weird to mix hair and feathers. I tried big feathers on the head to mimic hair, but didn't like it too much, so I went back to having both 🫡

The first colored Stella! I imagined her as a ttrpg fan. In the end she's the only one who doesn't play hahaha, fate works in mysterious ways. I explored the idea of her body colors to be dark, and her expressing against it with rainbow colored outfits and hair, but i dropped it.

To me this is the concept that really marked the first breakthrough in designing GVH. From the hair, the face and eye shape, to the feathered tail to the general vibe, the first Reed miraculously popped out of nowhere to set the tone for the whole cast!! 😎

Throughout all this @spacetreasured would concept characters as well and also try to adapt my designs into vector art, which consolidated Trish and Reed's designs. He also drew the first ever Naomi 😍

Of course Naomi needed hair, but as a parasaurolophus, she had a huge horn that made us struggle a bit with the hair, we had to flatten the horn quite a lot to make it work.

Also we have to talk about dear Leo. He got cut as he didn't fit one of the hundreds of story revisions we went through. He was a member of the swim team, his mom had tragically passed and he had been off school for a year as a result. I was binging free! at the time yes.

Some important context also is that I started designing the characters before we hired a writer, so I created most of them from scratch instead of through a character brief. Rosa is inspired by one of my best friends, Lola ;)

And here is the first complete main character roaster. I have to say that, originally, the game was (even more) ridiculously ambitious as you could choose to play either Fang, Rosa or Leo. Each of them with their own story and potential love interests.

By now you might have noticed that the characters are always drawn with their head at a profile view 🫠 It was time to figure out the different angles and that was definitely one of the biggest challenges of designing these morons!!

I spent like a week just trying and failing to draw anything conclusive. And in all my frustration I decided it was time for a radical solution.

3D!! 😠
Please appreciate this amazing very first rendition of Naomi.

Here is one of the first clean 3D versions of all of them. These models helped me TREMENDOUSLY in figuring out the shapes of these faces, and their latest versions served as mandatory guides for asset production.

I'm finding so much stuff making this thread haha.
Here you can delight yourself with this drawover of the 3D heads with hair - except Naomi for some reason (going back to her bald days it seems), some FOV struggles, a cursed Stella and the cast looking right through you haha

Anyway the 3D heads really helped figuring out the designs, and we got to stage 2 of the main cast designs! At this point we started working on our pitch trailer using these.

This trailer (that was only for pitching so it never got out publicly) was the first real production check of the designs and art direction. It made us realize that: first, the style is too detailed to be drawing these characters over and over.

Second, the faces are still not there, they are awkward in many angles and hard to work with, and also too big and unbalanced to fit the tiny human necks. (the last two, eww)

The eyes also got a rework during that trailer production. I love all these little Sages iterations haha ❤️

It was now time for the final character revision, as we were looking to start production and hire artists. I first did a pass on the main character's 3D faces to shorten the snouts, lower the bridges of the snouts and humanize the overall face shapes.

I then also simplified the overall character art style to make it cleaner and more efficient. Sage is a good example: he lost the hat, got simpler/bigger feathers on his tail, and the style is now less busy (very few fabric folds) and softer with thinner, colored lines.

A little spotlight on Fang now, whose outfit changed the most throughout the many design revisions. They started with a t-shirt & pants, then a long skirt and mesh blouse, mesh skirt and skeleton leggings, even some puff sleeves!

Trish, Reed and Naomi stayed pretty consistent, although Naomi definitely grew a softer vibe haha (she started out as a really stuck up and mean know it all)

Rosa got a first character sheet but ended up changing again because @sgonzalesart and @space_ellien who I was working with were drawing her way cuter that she was in the design I drew haha
I made myself a little inspiration board and went on to update the 3D head one more time.

@sgonzalesart @space_ellien Naser didn't get the memo about streamlining the details and kept his floral jacket (and I am so sorry to all the gvh artists), but because of historical accuracy (yes) it went from roses to protea and ferns. And Rosa went from cherry blossoms to Magnolias.

At that point it was summer of 2020, the game had been announced and looking back on our cast the team felt like it lacked body diversity. Rosa and Stella were always meant to be bigger characters but they looked pretty thin the way I drew them, so they got a revision, again!

(also some cute Stella sleeves designs)

And now with all of that in mind, here are the different cast ensembles through the years (2018 - 2019 - final).

And now you can appreciate the final character sheets (truthfully these were made mostly for marketing, the ones we had been using were way more simple).

Thank you for reading up to here!! Designing all of these characters really was a whole adventure, with a lot of sweat and tears and iterations, and I am so so proud of them. I also got so lucky with the team i got to work with, i couldn't have done it without their help ❤️