Thoughts on a character's hair color?

[Little Adventurer]

Not sure if I should be posting this here or a different thread, but I want your opinions on this.


Okay, so! One of my character is named Minuet Etude. She's the Mage of my game (she's sans hat in the pictures so you can see her hair better), and she looks like this:



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Cute little gal, I think. However, recently I was attempting to design an NPC and was hitting Randomize and got a cute girl with dark purple hair. So then I got to thinking, "How would Minuet look with this?" And then I tested it...



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"Not too bad, actually!" I thought.


Especially since my series has the characters age and grow older in each game, as you can see here by my main hero Alto:



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And I think it would make more logical sense to have Minuet's hair go from a darker shade of purple, to that lavender shade as she ages, to, say, this color once she's an old lady:



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However... I run into a few problems if I go with the color change. Firstly, I'd have to redo all those emotes I made for the character:



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And secondly, the lighter purple haired Minnie is what I picture her to initially look like in my head, so that's just weird to me...


Any thoughts?

 

[Dark_Metamorphosis]

Is it just me or is there nothing inside the spoilers? I cant see the images.

 

[Simon D. Aelsi]

Yeah man. Your spoilers are all blank, son!

 

[Niten Ichi Ryu]

spoilers are blank.


Anyway, I would say focus and stick to your original design. If your design idea can change from viewing a simple random, you need to refocus on what you want to achieve.


and do not try to anticipate too much the look of your characters when old. Time to design the older characters should come when you will make the game involving them. I think you are setting yourself another hurdle.

 

[slimmmeiske2]

For the people who want to see the images, Little Adventurer posted the same question here.


I agree with @Niten Ichi Ryu: stick to your original idea. Personally I like that look better, plus considering she's a mage, maybe she could use magic/potions to keep her hair that lovely shade of lilac?

 

[LaFlibuste]

I'd say it's not that noticeable, I had to look 2-3 times to spot the difference. I was thinking they'd be another color entirely, but they're just darker.

The only real thing I have to say is (if possible) to wrinkle up your older portraits. They just look like their younger selves but with bleached hair. They don't really look that much older...

 

[Mayuen]

I think it depends if you want to focus more on the aging aspect of the characters, or the idea you have of her design. Personally I agree on the idea that she should have darker than go to lighter and lighter when ageing. But as LaFlibuste said, you'd need to wrinkle them up a little to really get that message across.


And for the dilemma with her expressions, you can just crop out the new hair and put it on top of the expressions you have in a editing program of sort.


It is the same haircut after all.

 

[Little Adventurer]

Oh, I know she needs wrinkles! I was just using an example. Though that reminds me, I need to give Alto wrinkles, because that face was made before the update that gave use that facial structure.


Sorry about the pictures messing up.


Slim- actually that's her natural hair color. No justification for it, though. I got other characters who have blue and green hair too. Really, I just pick the color I think looks good on them.


Actually, Niten, I've been planning the whole characters aging for a long time, like pretty much since the beginning. I mean, Randomize can bring good results when you least expect it. 

 

[Niten Ichi Ryu]

I know you planned the whole character aging (I'm kind of following what you do, right ), what I am saying is: will you need the aged characters for Game 1?


If not, then you should delay designing them until you need them. because you know what? when you will need them let's say for Game 3, you will redesign them anyway.


I know you're are rather ambitious, and plan your whole story on 4 games, but you should go one Game at a time. shorter goals make it easier to see results and keep focused.


If there is something that 10+ years of Game Mastering taught me is that Character Development rarely happens as you planned it at the campaign stage, and that the best idea in terms of character development happens while playing. applying this to RM Game deving, it might happens for example that while you dev a part where  Main Character fights his Nemesis, you might decide that any event (Karmic strike, Heroic sacrifice...) could leave you character with a big scar (mental or physical), that you will have from now on to take into account into further character development.


Even the best written scenario is bound to evolve when confronted to directing it.

 

[Little Adventurer]

Oh. Well, crap I already designed Alto, sans wrinkles as an old man. Although...

Spoiler

I AM having an older Alto turn out to be the narrator in the good/true endings of the first game, which I think makes sense given his occupation. Bad endings are narrated by someone else though...

And yeah, i know I'm overly ambitious... >.< I know I should be focusing only one game at a time, but I keep thinking up stuff for later games too... like I already have a plan for the true ending of game 3...

 

[SLEEP]

you're making these in the generator, remaking all the emotes would be pretty easy lol. although even if they were hand drawn, recolouring the hair would be easy.,,


anyway if you've got 1 char visibly aging and the other one not thats gonna be the really weird thing imo

 

[slimmmeiske2]

Slim- actually that's her natural hair color. No justification for it, though. I got other characters who have blue and green hair too. Really, I just pick the color I think looks good on them.

I figured it was. What I meant with my "maybe she uses magic/potions to colour her hair" is that that would be an explanation to not let her hair turn grey (or at least not that soon) when she ages.

 

[kaukusaki]

I know folks in the hood who rock purple hair. My sister wears hot magenta and I'm golden bronze until I die lolz. So it's not unusual for me to see crazy hair colors. I'm used to it lolz