So I recently had an idea for an original story! Surprising for someone who only writes fanfiction (with original charcters, but featuring existing settings and concepts). It's going to be a sci-fi story involving augmented reality, giant robots and an invasion by a parallel world, with a cyberpunk anime style (but without the dystopia). Yes, I know, it sounds way overdone, but hopefully I can put my own spin on these tired tropes! The story stems from me having the brilliant idea of making a "mascot" character for this website (now that I think about it, the concept was more like a VTuber persona, though I don't stream at all!) I made the character in Hero Forge, and went as far as making a character design reference sheet for her when I realized, "Hey, I can make a story out of this!" And now here we are!
My one and only lament is that I can't draw well enough to make my own character and mech designs! Not only that, I'm rather bad at character design in general, especially highly stylistic designs like cyberpunk. I appreciate the style (it's so cool!) but can't come up with something similar myself. It's so frustrating!
So I've resorted to using character builders like Hero Forge to make my characters, with various style and clothing limitations. I'm also searching VGen.co for adoptable ready-made character designs I can use for my characters. In this instance, I've built my main character in Hero Forge, and bought character designs for my supporting characters from artists on VGen. It's not as expensive as I originally thought, which I'm thankful for! I might have an issue finding an artist to do the mecha designs, though that's currently a problem for another day.
Here's the character design sheet I made for my main character, using Hero Forge models:
Eventually, I plan to commission an artist to revamp this sheet (convert to anime style, improve the overall character design, etc.) I didn't make the other characters in this same way because of Hero Forge limitations (they specialize in fantasy-style tabletop minis) and because I seem to only have one kind of character design in my head and can't keep using it for everyone!
So with most of the character design out of the way, I'm now working on planning and worldbuilding. Hopefully someday soon I'll get this project up and running!
Current Mood: artistic 