Today we are diving into the process for designing the kobolds for The Unheist of Hearthburn House! We've mentioned this numerous times, but we cannot thank our artist Caitlyn enough for her work on this project. While our team had our own ideas for the game, Caitlyn came in and added her style, making the game even better!

To start the process, we had to decide how we wanted our "default" kobold to appear. Since kobolds are a loosely defined creature, we definitely had a range to choose from for our character designs.

Ultimately, we wanted our kobolds to appear more lizard-like, removing the styles that were more aquatic or "bat-like" from the list. We then decided to use a mix of the other styles so that each kobold had it's own unique style and flair.

All of these design choices led to us creating this kobold as our first full render! While they didn't end up making it into the game as a character, they set the pace for the characters' appearances and expressions.

Now that we had set the general direction for character designs, we then put together our character descriptions and art briefs for Caitlyn. These briefs were simple descriptions along with a sentence about their personality. We wanted Caitlyn to have flexibility in brining these kobolds to life. For example, Wisteria's art brief was, "Cheerful caretaker, adorned with flowers, green and yellow hues. Tries her best to make sure everyone is having a wonderful day and the chance to smell fresh flowers each morning."

Then Caitlyn would provide us with a couple of options to choose from. It was honestly a hard decision as they are all so cute, but we went with option B for our character Wisteria.

And that's how we created the 12 kobolds for The Unheist of Hearthburn House! We hope you enjoyed getting to see the process and possible variations for our characters. And as always, don't forget to answer the today's trivia question!