Since the game is about Arashi, of course I had to start by actually designing her. Her older self has a very established look (sorry to those who have yet to see it, but the main site will be up as soon as possible).
Now, Arashi is younger than her original design in this story, and she is not part of the Kinshutai which means her uniform had to address these facts. So I went for a more functional approach without much actual armor since she is a student. I kept the scarf motif since her older self uses one as her unique flair to differentiate from the other Kinshutai. I also decided to give her an actual skirt, which is not entirely without purpose… consider it an extremely subtle hint about her past in connection with other characters in Shadowdawn. I also made her hair shorter than her older self (no one has seen that redesign yet, which I promise to reveal soon).
One of the main concerns about developing the game is animation, since it is targetted for Xbox 360 the screen resolution is pretty high and it’s not easy to do simple pixel sprites to cut down on asset development. I may use Flash as a base to draw on top of to speed up the process, but haven’t decided yet. But I had to keep the outfit somewhat simple to accomodate this because an extravagant, multi-part piece like her older Kinshutai armor would be extremely difficult to animate quickly.
