Hello, spellcasters!
We've been chatting with the dev about Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times and asked them some questions we thought you'd find interesting. Welcome to our new series: Rune Records! With each Rune Record, we'll be diving into different aspects of the game's development and design.
For our first Rune Record, we asked the dev: Show us some before and afters of the art!
There are quite a few of these so we'll be sharing them weekly! Starting off with Rhell herself!
Rhell has come a looooooong way since I first designed her! This first sketch of the character that would one day become Rhell was maybe around 5-6 years ago! I had these weird little characters in my head for a while. At the time I was working on a third person movement shooter and I needed a cartoony enough character design that wouldn't look too violent in a cartoony setting running around with toy guns. I created this weird fictional race who all had weird colourful skin, big ears, and some kind of horn. I didn't know it at the time but this would eventually be a style of character I would keep coming back to in my designs.
Fast forward to when I began working on Rhell properly (2 years ago). I had played around with a few character designs, the one I took the furthest was this weird kind of stiff human. I had drawn out sketches and even went as far as to rig and create a 2D model for them. But honestly… I found that he was way too ugly and boring, aside from a unique hat he was just, some guy, and in a game as wacky as Rhell, I wanted the main character to be UNIQUE.
So thinking about my old designs and characters I went back to one I had always enjoyed, colourful weird goblin things. And an old character design I had made was reborn as Rhell.
Once I made my first real sketch of Rhell, honestly it was quite close to her final design, she has her iconic gigantic nose and big silly hat (though if you look closely you'll see her original name here was ‘Shlep-Shell’ before I crossed that out!)
I am the type to really get a firm idea of a character and design in my head, way before I ever draw them out, so a lot of my character sketches end up being pretty close to the finished thing. Except with only a few changes being made along the way for the sake of practicality, her hat was shrunk down slightly, here cape would have had buttons to fasten it but those were removed for being too small a detail. Her face was changed to be more grumpy, rather than how sad and pathetic she looks here. Her wand was also changed… because I did not want to draw an infinity symbol on all her animation frames.
Now that I had Rhell's design pretty firmly created, I was still not sure about what format she should be in-game. I knew at this point Rhell's game design would be about using weird magical spells, so I wanted to make a character that could interact with the world and look as stylized as the magic itself.
My original plan was to make Rhell as a 3D model, render her out as a series of 2D frames and then animate those in game, making edits whenever I needed something extra stylized.
This approach did not last long, mainly because I just found her too ugly looking (sorry 3d Rhell). And I decided if I wanted a stylized main character then the best way to do so was to make her fully hand drawn 2D frames, so I got to work drawing out all the animations I would need for Rhell.
For me I find games easier to make once I already have the main visuals and designs in place, which means in a lot of this old early on Rhell footage, Rhell is pretty closely animated to how she looks in Rhell today. 
And there you have it; that is how our beloved Rhell came to be! We hope you'll enjoy this style of dev diary as we have loads more to come your way! Let us know if there are any questions you have for the dev as well and we can feature it in upcoming Rune Records!