Design Spotlight [HUNTER]

For this week, we wanted to go over the design of one of our dear Strayer brothers. We will switch off talking about all of them along with other townies, so if you are interested in how we conceptualize all the characters, stay tuned!

To kick things off, we wanted to cover Hunter, the eldest brother!

(Early sketch)

Steam post image (Final design)

Canonically, Hunter is about 6’4, making him the tallest of the brothers. He is also the oldest, being about 32. As the leader of his brothers following their fathers passing and as the unofficial leader of Skipclaw - though he’s more akin to a military general - he needed to stand out in a scene.

Hunter's concept was essentially ‘the scariest man alive.’ He represents hyper-masculinity, the very idea of Man dominating nature. He needed to look intimidating and what could be more intimidating than a man draped in dead animals holding a gun?

When I was first sketching him, I wanted his mask to be somewhat difficult to discern. Initially, his face was meant to be quite obscured, giving him an unreadable expression, but the idea of a big open bear mouth like a bear rug was too tasty of an idea to ignore. To keep the idea of face obscuration, he wears a full balaclava under the mask, though it's too shadowy to see the eyes so he does look like he's just wearing a full face sock.

A big thing I keep coming back to is the idea of false eyes in designs, so his face being hidden and then his bear eyes being above them is intentionally uncanny.

Going down, he has layered his bear cowl with additional stitched together fur from past kills. To add to that, he has deer legs, raccoon tails, and deer tails, all telegraphing this idea of a trophy hunter. He doesn’t care about the smell that might bring either, which only adds to the slight unhinged nature of his design.

Of course the thing literally tying it all together is the red string. Each brother has a color associated with them and Hunter’s is red~! Red is blood, red is intimidating, red is anger - it's not that complicated. But my favorite detail is the red around his mouth - while initially I wanted to invoke the sense of sinew from a fresh kill around the bear’s mouth, I think it also nicely represents Hunter being trapped in his own head about his own ideals. A man who lives by hate dies by hate you know?

Hunter is also given the biggest gun out of all of them. It's an AK47, but don’t hold me to that in it's accuracy. It was the biggest gun I could think of that Americans have access to and I have no doubt that the Strayers could get their hands on a few of those before everything went down. He doesn’t have a melee weapon - his fists are enough.

Ending at his shoes, I have him in military pants and boots - the Strayers definitely raided army surplus stores prior to the creation of the commune. Military lingo and fetishizing combat gear go hand in hand with doomsday cults. Not sure if red army fatigues is a thing, but [waves hands around dismissively].

One final thing is the lighting - all the characters in RUNT have specific lighting to hint at their character personality. Since the character designs are largely what people see in the game, it's the most critical thing that they have plenty of story elements within them so the player can ruminate over them while reading and engaging with the story. Hunter is lit from the top and behind. He needed lots of shadow to make him seem bulkier and his head is the focus. The light from behind is mostly rimlight to highlight the spiky fur and hard edges of his design. In all, he has a strong presence, but much of him is shadowy, leaving room for the player to think what else he could be hiding~.

It was really fun and felt pretty straightforward to design him looking back on it. He - personally - is not my favorite brother design though, but I’m quite pleased with how people have reacted to him. Seeing people openly fear him when he enters a scene is the exact effect we hoped for. Seeing people openly lust for him… Well, we all have our vices. If anybody ever cosplays him or draws him, good luck finding that much fur!!!

As for my favorite design, I will touch on that another time!

FANART

This week, we’d like to show off Miikpal’s art of their Runtsona! We are absolutely tickled by the colors of the fishing lures - it's super inventive and fits right into the world of RUNT.

If you have fanart, be sure to post it to Bluesky and tag it #runtVN or @/grimstastestudio ! We would love to see it~!!!

That’s all for now! Y’all come back now, ya hear?

Love,

Soren & Yves (Grimtaste Studios)