Meet Fen! She’s traveling with her mum and dad and the other refugees to the eastern continent.
Since her father is ilfen, he has faced a lot of discrimination. Fen’s mother did too, just for being married to him. Neither of them wanted Fen to have that kind of life–especially since she takes after her father–and they often discussed leaving the city. Unfortunately, that was not a peaceful exodus as they had hoped; it came about through a regime change, riots, and anti-ilfen sentiments at an all time high to boot.
Fen’s feelings on the journey are mixed. She’s always been an adventurous sort, but moving meant she also had to leave behind close friends. But she inherited her mother’s fierce and determined attitude, and she intends to make the best of things. Being of the more outgoing persuasion, she quickly decides quiet Tav will be her friend…
Fen went through a LOT of different renditions in a lot of different ways.
I’d known pretty early on that I wanted a green-haired girl in the game, and that she’d be one of the more “main-ish” characters. I also wanted to represent the ilfen in one of the characters that Tav interacts with regularly, since they’re a big part of the story too. But that didn’t all come together for quite some time…
One of the first remakes I did was a blonde woman. I was having trouble with that, so I did a version with red hair (which ended up being Zhar’s daughter), That went surprisingly well. And I knew I still wanted the green-haired girl in the game, so I did a quick clone and recolor of the redhead. At that point, all three had white skin. Fen had a white dress too, so she was extremely pale!
For months, every time I would work on another remake, I’d come back to Fen and try to fix her. I’d tweak a few things–hair, dress, color, face shape, arms (arms are hard for some reason)–before getting dissatisfied and moving on to something else. But I think she improved a little bit each time. Her hair started from a generic “mid-length” hair and ended up over her shoulder. I went back and forth on how many ilfen features to give her as I decided what the ilfen actually were (the ears were the last thing I added!). I made the dress less billowy and messed with the neckline for ages (seriously, when the dress is four pixels tall, it gets difficult). I even briefly gave her a dress like Firula’s… and scrapped that because it didn’t fit Fen’s character in the slightest.
But the hardest part was getting the skin tone right. You’re only allowed three colors with Game Boy Color style sprites (though technically you could add more colors by layering sprites on top of each other). Black counts as one color, and since pretty much everything is outlined in The Waking Cloak (gives it a cartoony style and helps with readability), that leaves us with two colors to work with. And every brown/black from my palette I tried just either didn’t work with the green or didn’t work with the black. I tried switching back to white skin, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I checked out other sprites from the GBC (namely Dragon Warrior since they actually had dark-skinned NPCs) to see what they did, and unfortunately they didn’t have any secondary color–it was brown skin with black/white clothes. Tried black clothes on Fen and it looked like she was wearing a void into nothingness. And I didn’t want to scrap the green and give her white hair–that would just defeat the purpose!
In the end it worked out. I’m not sure exactly what happened–I switched back to the first brown I’d used, and it just… clicked! It finally looked right. Maybe it was because I was using a newer shade of green, maybe not, but either way, I was so excited to continue working on her and finished up her sprite that day.