Hellenica Party Intros: Nephele, the theomechanist Part 2

It's still Monday in a few places, and that means the next part of our party intros series is due!

Last time I introduced Nephele, our affable and outspoken theomechanist, and today I'd like to explain a couple of her unlockable skills.

Nephele is one of the major damage dealers in your party, but sometimes you have to be clever to make the most of her talents.

For example, here's her skill Sky Shot. When used, Nephele will fire a volley of arrows up into the air that will do a ton of damage upon landing. So what's the catch?

The catch is that the arrows won't hit their targets until the end of the player's next turn! So, you need to plan ahead and target an area you think enemies will be standing in the future. Of course, you can also make use of any repositioning skills your other party members have to setup the shot.

The other skill I wanted to reveal is called Power Shot. Most of Nephele's abilities deal Physical damage, which means any enemies with the Heavy defense type will take reduced damage. Power Shot deals piercing damage that ignores this penalty, and it also hits all enemies in a line.

If you're able to shove some enemies around, this line shot can be super effective.

Each of these skills costs some steam pressure to use, so tracking that resource is central to utilizing Nephele effectively.

Wednesday I'll introduce our third party member, Brasidas! He's another completely different character altogether, so check back!

Also, if you haven't already, please visit our Steam page and wishlist the game! Sharing these blog posts and retweeting us on Twitter also helps immensely. Thank you!

Hellenica Party Intros: Nephele, the theomechanist

It's finally Friday, and that means it's time for the next party member introduction!

Quick reminder: Hellenica is launching on January 23rd, and we'd really appreciate your wishlists/follows!

Now on to the next party member: Nephele, the theomechanist!

Prior to her adventuring career, Nephele was a temple priestess at a small temple of Apollo outside Athens. In addition to helping out with religious rites, Nephele's also in charge of keeping all of the temple machinery in tip-top shape. That is, when she's not tinkering on her own steam-powered gadgets.

In combat, Nephele sports a mini-pressurized boiler and her trusty steam bow:

Her steam bow can deal incredibly high single-target damage, especially when using her stored up steam pressure to hop up to high vantage points:

In addition to these basic abilities, Nephele builds up one unit of steam pressure each turn to power her unlockable skills. The first skill you'll get to use is called Depressurize. It uses up all of her pressure to push all adjacent characters up to 5 spaces:

Unless said characters hit a wall or fall off a cliff, that is. ;)

Check back in Monday, and I'll dig into a few of Nephele's other skills! (Part 2 is here!)

Also, you can check out the Diona intro from earlier in the week, as well as a series on Hellenica's other battle mechanics.

Remember to head over and wishlist Hellenica on steam and retweet our announcements on twitter! Thanks everyone.

Hellenica Characters: Reworking Diona, Nephele, and Nyx

Now that we've wrapped up most of our character portraits for Hellenica, we had some time to go back and revise some of our earliest characters. We realized that the first pieces we worked on with our previous artists didn't quite match up with the style we established with our current artist. Ack! Who will save us now?!

Oh, I guess our current artist. Probably.

So, we had her do a little touch-up work. Here's a process shot of how our characters were transformed:

Nephele and Nyx were fairly straightforward. We shrunk their heads and eyes down a bit to be closer to the mostly realistic character proportions of our other characters. In Nephele's case, we had to make her nose and mouth a little more well-defined as well.

For Diona, we made similar adjustments to her facial features, but in the end we just weren't happy with the way the pose was working out. During her conversations in game, she looked unbalanced and a bit awkward. So, starting again from the sketch stage we put together something more natural. We already had a great color scheme worked out, so it was a little easier than completely starting from scratch.

And that's that! As on the internet, photoshop can fix any problem. What do you think? We're hopeful that once players get into the game they'll never even know that these three characters were originally done by a different artist!

Hellenica Characters: Nephele!

Welcome to what will hopefully become a recurring series here at the Dragonloft blog!

First off, our goal with the art in Hellenica is to make the world feel grand and full of vitality, while staying true to the comfortable anime stylings of the JRPG genre.

In the interest of failing fast to learn from our mistakes, we wanted to try illustrating one of our most complicated characters first, so we chose Nephele, our adventure-seeking temple mechanic.

In her day-to-day life, Nephele keeps the steam machines in one of Apollo's many temples running smoothly. This puts her at the intersection of steampunk and ancient Greece and makes her a perfect early case study. In terms of personality, she's the exuberant, always-curious, and ever-noble mechanic of the party whose only knowledge of adventure is what she's heard of Odysseus and Perseus. She's the perfect combination of naive and book smart for making things interesting in an adventure.

Personality in mind and a ton of collected reference later, we starting talking with our character artist, Cotton, to see what he could do for us!

In my mind, I pictured Nephele somewhere between Edward from Cowboy Bebop and Rikku from Final Fantasy X. Starting with that image, we went broad with a bunch of ideas. At this point, we weren't focusing on the pose or expression of the character; we were just trying to nail down the details of her styling and accoutrements.

Some things stuck out right away. Tricornes read a little too 'pirate' to me, and Victor felt the midriff ruffles were too Victorian (ha) for our time period. Now, I know what you're thinking: "These people had the ingenuity to harness steam power and create complex, futuristic machines, but they can't envision a ruffle?" If at all possible, we like to stay historically accurate, and we pay special attention to the visual details of our game to ensure that we're reinforcing our unique setting.

That said, there was a lot to love about this exploration. The big, chunky goggles and oversized tool pockets really felt steampunk, along with all the gear work and grommets. As for the ancient Greek side of things, we really gravitated towards the thin sandals and flowing tunics.

After picking and choosing some key elements, Cotton developed this detail sketch. Some new features to note: the vine-like bangle on the wrist, the more obviously Greek sandals, and the added volume and detail in the tunic.

At this point, he mocked up a few poses and moved on to coloring.

We wanted Nephele to look right at home with the steam machines that she is so fond of, so Cotton suggested some warm brass, metallic, and orange tones for her hair and clothing. To add some contrast and visual interest, we chose to color her eyes a bright blue. With that and a few tell-tale grease smudges, she was ready.

I hope you enjoyed the walkthrough. Let me know how these posts may be improved or added upon in the comments below, and I'll try to work your feedback into the next character update!