Pagan is a character design project built around one question I apparently can't stop asking myself: what happens when you take old mythology, religious imagery, body horror, and fantasy character design and throw all of it into the same pot?The character began with the idea of a resurrected figure who shouldn't really exist anymore. I wanted something that could feel ancient without becoming another conventional fantasy warrior, and something supernatural without losing the sense that there is still a physical person underneath everything. The skull and antlers immediately became the dominant visual language, but I didn't want the rest of the design competing with them. That meant keeping much of the body relatively human while allowing the corruption, scars, asymmetry, layered clothing, and oversized weapons to suggest that something much stranger is happening.
One of my favorite parts of developing this piece was figuring out how much information I could remove while keeping the character recognizable. The full illustration lets me play with anatomy, textures, damage, jewelry, fabric, markings, and all the little details I naturally obsess over. The pixel version doesn't have that luxury. Suddenly a complicated shape might be represented by a handful of pixels, and something that looks fantastic in an illustration can become complete visual garbage when reduced to game scale.
That forced me to think about the character as a collection of identifiers rather than details. The antler silhouette matters. The pale skull matters. The dark limbs matter. The lighter torso and the hanging red fabric matter. The asymmetry between the arms matters. Those larger relationships survive when almost everything else disappears.
It was also a fun reminder that designing a character for a game isn't necessarily the same problem as designing a character for an illustration. An illustration only has to succeed from the perspective I'm showing you. A game character has to survive being turned around. Once I started working through the front, back, side, and three-quarter sprite views, little cheats in the original design suddenly had to become actual decisions. Where does this piece of clothing connect? How far do the antlers extend backward? What does that shape look like from behind? Which details need to remain consistent, and which ones can disappear because nobody is going to notice them at this scale anyway?
That process is honestly part of why I love character development. You start with this dramatic idea of some resurrected pagan nightmare carrying an absurd sword, and eventually you find yourself staring at twelve pixels wondering whether moving one of them slightly to the left makes his ass look weird.
Such is the noble pursuit of art.
There is still plenty I want to explore with Pagan, particularly animation, weapon movement, alternate equipment, and how the illustrated aesthetic translates into an actual game environment. For now, though, this sheet represents the point where the character stopped being merely an illustration and started feeling like someone who could actually exist inside a game.
Created by Rieley Finn using a combination of illustration, character design, and pixel-art development.
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