A Necessary Sacrifice

 

This odd-looking woman is one of many background characters ("NPCs", if you will) that will appear in BFD. She'll only be on screen for at most a couple lines and then disappear, though she may or may not show up in a CG or two, possibly with a more normal face. 

The role of NPCs like her is to establish that there are more people in the game's world beside the main cast. The concepts and conceits behind BFD's worldbuilding are of epic proportions and affect the entire human race, but BFD's story is focused on a tiny subset of humanity. I figured that including background characters would make the world feel more fleshed out and help players feel that there are a lot more stories going on in this game's world, stories that ultimately go untold but exist nonetheless. Also, some aspects of their designs are symbolic of certain aspects of the world's culture, but I'll leave that for players to discover. 

 These NPCs aren't necessary to include, and I've often wondered whether it's a good idea to include them in the first place. In other VNs, background characters usually aren't given sprites, instead appearing solely in the text, though sometimes you'll see them represented as generic silhouettes or faceless mannequins. They're almost never given full designs because there's no real reason to. There's no need to lengthen the development time by creating assets for them, and they're probably not worth the extra disk space. Even so, I feel that BFD's background characters add enough to the game experience to justify their existence.

Of course, I still recognize that these guys should be treated as minor set pieces in the grand scheme of things, so I haven't been putting a lot of time into drawing them. As a result, many of them look a little wonky, some more so than others. Most are unremarkable (but clearly messy in terms of anatomy and rendering), but a few are notable for being a little funny and uncanny. I think it really sells the idea that the world of BFD is not what it seems at a cursory glance.

At the very least, I hope players will be amused by their strange appearances. Besides not wanting to spend a lot of time on NPC art, one of the main reasons I haven't fixed the above woman's sprite is because her lopsidedness has grown on me. The audience will probably be spending a lot less time with her than I have, but maybe they'll feel something similar.

Some of you might be wondering why I've dedicated a whole post to some nobody that'll only be on screen for like 5 seconds while having nothing for the game's actual main cast. Rest assured, they're all fully-designed, and I'll write more about them someday, though it'll probably be sometime closer to Chapter 1's release (or at least when I have enough decent-looking art of them completed).