This update took a lot longer day-wise than I had intended, but here are the next two in-game character profile graphics. Ket was actually completed Saturday, but I didn’t want to post him alone since I am still unsure how people will respond to a “cat” as a main character (and not merely a wisecracking sidekick). I’m working on the dialog and status artwork pertaining to the first level, so the design of Prince Tristen Valgus was also necessary.
Once I finish Morsett and Nephele’s profile artwork, I’ll post their stories on the main page. For now though, I hope you like these two characters. Kinshutai Captain Shion is next on the list as he’s the next character Arashi meets in the opening stage, so please look forward to it!
There’s a long story behind these first three characters (Arashi, Ket, and Tristen). You see, back in 1994 I was determined to make an RPG set in my fiction novel world of Euterra called Shadowdawn. The scope was excessively ambitious, the world was huge compared to the console and PC RPGs of the time (Final Fantasy VI and Ultima VIII were the games I was playing that year). So after about three years of trying to learn Windows programming (this was just before the advent of DirectX), I realized that it would take forever to make the game I wanted. That’s when I sat down and decided I needed a game with a much smaller, focused scope. So I decided I wanted to make an RPG closer in scope to the original Dragon Quest, of course modernized to match the the console RPGs of 1997. That’s when Arashi and the world told only of in Euterran mythology, Lexis, was born. Arashi originally was going on a solo adventure through her home country of Foxfire, fighting evil, and had a sidekick that was (get this) a cat. My friend, Jessica, said it was kind of boring just to have a cat come along, so I evolved him into Ket, the mountain lion-sized razorcat with huge black wings. And the story revolved around Arashi’s martial arts master, Tristen.
Of course, that game evolved into the game Shadowdawn, with the addition of Euterran mainstays Galven, Tiya, Byakko, Laura, and finally Mynette. With the addition of main characters the game had increased in scope, but not nearly to the levels as the game set in Euterra had done. It is certainly a game I still believe can be made, but not by myself, which was my motivation for starting the Shadowdawn Genesis project – a game I could make in a relatively short time and possibly make some money to find some team members after it was done. The real irony of the story is that this game is essentially the game I had first concepted in 1997, with Arashi and her companion Ket travelling Foxfire, revolving around Tristen.
