Attention Fortuna Citizens!
It’s Alexandra with a very exciting new addition to the game. You may have noticed that all of our player-characters and NPCs in our videos and screenshots have been a variation of dudes with different hairstyles, clothing and skintones. But things have been a little different lately! That’s because we’ve been busy designing the female model, which ended up being quite tricky to make.
Now that we have women running around the city, I thought it would be a great time to chat with 3D artist Alex to see what the historical inspirations were for the female model design and the technological challenges.
Q: What did women wear in 550 AD Constantinople and how does that inform Streets of Fortuna?
A: In Constantinople, a combination of various secular and religious orthodoxies dictated fairly confined lives for most women, and strict garment usage. But then again, one of the most famous women of the period (Empress Theodora) managed to achieve one of the greatest rags-to-riches successes in all of history. And what if she had managed to take the empire’s power for herself? What would have happened then?
We have no interest in arbitrary restrictions or penalties for women in Fortuna, whether they’re players or NPCs. Our philosophy is that female characters can (and will) wear or do anything that men do, but that they will tend towards wearing the more feminine garb of the time. This honours the aesthetics of our historical context, while offering the gameplay experience that we want. Life as a street rat is already hard enough without encountering misogyny day to day. Live your other life.
Q: What can you tell us about developing a character style for Streets of Fortuna?
Let’s take a walk down memory lane and have a look at the visual progression of the women of our game:
Chapter 1: Exploration
These are some very early explorations that didn’t last long. For much of this time, we were still deciding if moving forward with Streets of Fortuna would happen at all. Thus, this approach was mostly focused on being something very lightweight that we could use in early prototyping and ideation to explore some basic variety and the aesthetic of the game.
Chapter 2: What if they looked better though?
As soon as Streets of Fortuna was greenlit at the studio, we needed to develop a character style and start answering many technical questions: How were we going to support hundreds of performant, simulated NPCs? How were we going to be able to make that many assets? How do you even make modular 3D characters at this scale? And what art style are we actually excited about working in?
We decided on certain obvious truths: We needed characters that were low poly and lightweight to maximize performance at our scale. To us, that meant working with as few textures, and as much batching, as possible. At this time we also had no expectation that characters would be seen close-up or in a dialogue view — so they only had to be readable and interesting at a maximum zoom level of about 40% screen height.
Given these constraints, and the existing skillsets & excitements of artists at Kitfox, we started exploring a handpainted style that would fit everything for one character on a 512x512 diffuse texture.
(Right: Early concepts by our Art Director, Xin)
Around this time, we produced a quick visual target diorama to test out this initial approach. Here you can start to see hints of the character style that we’re still developing today — although it’s a lot more cartoonish.
(An early diorama featuring a gorgeously handpainted environment by our Environment Artist, Quinn!)
Chapter 3: Let’s get serious
The visual target diorama was a valuable exercise for us as a team. However, we realized pretty quickly that this style was too goofy and didn’t support the impression of the serious, deep simulation that Streets of Fortuna represents. Additionally, we just didn’t completely vibe with the mix of cel shaded materials + outline over handpainted diffuse. We decided that our next step would be to try and push our character style to be more grounded and realistic, while still retaining the technical pillars that we had decided on. The results were a big glow up for our lady friends:
(Right: The Blacksmith - an exploration of a larger, more imposing body type)
(More beautiful concept art that drove us to explore higher detail & realism, while retaining stylized handpainting.)
Version 4: Present Day
This brings us to our most recent push. As our pipeline and character style solidified, we set our sights on getting real characters generating into the city of Fortuna. A lot of technical work went in to making modular characters happen -- we added improvements like LODs, dynamic texture atlasing, character authoring integration tech, and much more. And just recently, we were finally able to add the latest iteration of our female characters to the game!
Here’s a look at a helpful shopkeeper that you might get the chance to meet.
And finally, some recent concepts for new outfits that women of Fortuna could wear.
Conclusion
If you’ve been following our micro-updates on the Kitfox Discord, you might have already seen the female models in-game as NPCs. But now we are also able to make female player characters. You’ll have the chance to customize your character before starting your game with different faces, hairstyles and clothing. In the next update, we’ll have a new devlog from Brent showing off how Character Generation is done. 
See you in the next one!
-Alexandra, Alex and the rest of the Streets of Fortuna team