Devlog: How we designed Meho

To celebrate Solstride’s head start on Steam, we decided to create a devlog-series, in which we break down our development processes in the various areas of game development.

Without further ado, let’s talk about our main character, Meho!

Steam post imageMeho wakes up in a mysterious world, not knowing what transpired before her awakening and especially what part she played in the horrible event that transpired before her awakening. Meho has a strong sense of purpose and a certain drive to figure out the mystery that is her life.

Visually we already had an idea of how we want to approach a character like Meho, since we knew where the game was headed in terms of visuals. Solstride is set in a solarpunk world, which translates into some of our Design choices, such as patchwork clothing, handwoven, quilted and natural dyes. Before we designed Meho as a character, we looked at how a main character should look and then translated Meho into those considerations.

For the sketch process, we tried to blend in more recent clothing styles with the in-world style of Solstride, which resulted in a mix of modern, yet post-apocalyptic outfit concepts. It was quite the challenge, because these aesthetics usually oppose each other. By the end of the sketch phase, there were some very interesting outfits, please check them out!

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Finally, we decided on this sketch and started drawing a character concept based on that sketch. We went through multiple design iterations for our main character, since there were so many ideas on how they could look, because of this unique blend of traditional, modern and futuristic aesthetics. It was both a challenge and a pleasure to get creative and mix-match those

different styles together.

Now that we decided on the kind of silhouette our main character was donning, we wanted to pinpoint, who exactly our main character was going to be.

Both the art and game design department came together to collect everything there is about our main character story-wise. What is their past? How does the player get to interact as that character? What kind of personality does our character have? Meho is in her late 20s, Female (She/Her) and is of East-Asian descent.

In terms of personality, the decision was made to have Meho be more of a self-insert character to the player, which means that Meho doesn’t talk much, while she is also the only human being in Solstride. As such, we worked on Meho’s specifics with those considerations in mind:

Steam post imageWith that being said, we had a clearer picture in mind of what Meho will look like and immediately went over different palettes to determine our final character. Again you will see the interesting blend of different aesthetics in the outfit itself.

At the very end, we added Meho’s Weapon. A staff, which incorporates the same aesthetic design choices as Meho herself. Additionally, if you look closer into the staff you will see that the crystal on the tip of her staff looks very natural, something unique to Meho’s Weapon.

And that wraps up our very first Devlog! We hope you enjoyed reading through this little tale of ours and we are excited to share more about our development with you, so stay tuned!