A downloadable Character Design

My submission for the Gamebridge Awards 2D Art Excellence category.

This is the 2D design portion of my personal project turned uni project where I redesigned and 3D modelled the character Captain Elaina Sartell from both the light of Xarixus D&D module and the adaptation the module got late 2023 for the Neverwinter MMO.

Although I had had my issues with her initial book design as It was quite bland and didn’t convey that she was a ship’s captain, it did its job of conveying her practicality and there wasn’t anything egregious about it so I could overlook parts I didn’t like.
However, when the module was adapted into the MMO they decided to redesign her and being completely honest the redesign was awful, neglecting to improve on the original design and instead creating a confusing bulky low contrast mess which was quite the disappointment as I had made my way through the game with the soul intent to see Elaina’s 3D model because I quite liked her in the spelljammer campaign my friends and I play so I decided to redesign her myself :D.

My goal for this redesign was to both better convey her confident Bandit captain description in the book while being innkeeping with her job as a privateer for a prince while also keeping the design recognisable as Elaina.

I also gave her backstory a small rework as there wasn’t too much in her original book description to go off.

More information