The Progression of Liliya

Due to a number of factors, including the ongoing election drama in the US and some personal and day-job challenges, there’s not a lot of progress this week that lends itself to screenshots. Mostly we did some story work and some work revising the game design document, which still contains vestiges of the original mobile incarnation of the game.

So, instead of Screenshot Saturday this week, we’re going to share some concept art and talk a little bit about the main character in Republic Snipe Resurrection: Liliya Park.

The Story Bible introduces her like this:

Liliya Park is a Marine Private who will become a member of Archon One¹ at some point. We first meet her shortly after boarding the ERS Oberon, a Marine Command Light Assault Ship in the Sao Paolo Battlegroup. Liliya is young, thin and athletic. In high school, Liliya excelled at several sports, but she was most accomplished as a gymnast. She retains much of the lean muscle and overall build typically associated with gymnasts.

Though growing up, Liliya was always positive, upbeat, and outgoing with many friends and a normal social life, by the the time our story begins, Liliya has become withdrawn and a bit of a loner. She gets along fine with people, but does not seek out company or companionship. She is laser-focused on becoming a great soldier, and that desire has pushed aside most other normal interests and social concerns. She is prone to following orders to the best of her ability. She’s not one to question authority. She is young, trusting, and (frankly) pretty naive. Her upbringing in a military family during a time of war and the loss of several close family members to that war gives her a fairly jingoistic worldview and very little empathy for the Seditionists.

One of the fundamental conceits of the characters in the Turncoat universe is that, with a few exceptions, characters don’t need to have an apparent ethnicity that matches their name. A character with an Irish name does not have to be Irish, or even caucasian. A passage from Liliya’s bio helps explain why this is the case:

Surnames in the Turncoat universe can be a bit strange compared to modern names. Upon becoming a legal adult, people get to choose between keeping their birth surnames (a combination of their parents' last names), or choosing a new one. Some people choose to change their surname just because they like a particular name, other simply choose to go by just one of their parents' names for brevity. Some people choose a name to honor someone they respect or look up to, such as is the case for Liliya, who goes by her grandmother’s surname rather than her birth name of Sergeyeva-Calais. For certain legal purposes (such as a military personnel file), a person’s surname is actually a combination of all four of their grandparent’s surnames, but that name is almost never used outside of legal documents because of how unwieldy and long it can be. Liliya’s surname for legal purposes, for example, is Sergeyeva-Calais-Matu-Park.

We know that Liliya’s ancestry is very diverse so that, combined with the way names are chosen in the Turncoat Universe, gave us a lot of room to play with her appearance.

At the time the original project was cancelled, we had just started exploring what she might look like, and our in-house artist had produced one exploration sheet.

When we started the project back up recently, the original artist wasn’t available to iterate on the concept, so we hired a freelance artist to do some more explorations. This was the first round of explorations:

The whole team like the results, but none of them was quite right. The outfit in the first drawing was a little too 70s sci-fi for us. The fourth was a little too twentieth century tactical police. We liked both of the other outfits, but felt that the green outfit wasn’t right for Liliya.

We went back and had the artist combine features from a few of the sketches and also give her a slightly more athletic physique, resulting in this:

There’s still more iteration and refinement ahead of us, but Liliya is starting to take shape. We’d like her ethnic background to be a bit more ambiguous and less apparently white, so we’re probably looking at at least one more round of iterating on her appearance before we move to polish and modeling.

1 - Archon One is the name of a unit from the original Turncoat game.