Game character redesign

NoSleep is a sci-fi/cyberpunk story I began to develop a few years ago for YaoiJam about a young man with the ability to steal people's lifeforce by taking their dreams, much like the legendary dream eater "Baku" from Japanese folklore. The main character would take on the characteristics of the people he was draining and develop empathy and even love for them as a result of the dream eating, making him a good protagonist for a story with multiple romance options.

As the sole developer for this game, it remained unfinished, so instead of scrapping the project, I'm looking to redevelop it, adding 3D art, animation, and puzzle gameplay to make it more engaging than its original visual novel format. I'm also changing it to be more of a mystery whodunit than purely a dating sim.

My first step was to give the main character a new outfit and a new name that better fit their backstory. Originally an odd-job mercenary in a never-quite-decided-upon futuristic city, the new character is a mystic assassin who takes down targets by infiltrating their dreams and lives in a city that takes inspiration from both Shanghai and Iran. I was looking to incorporate more architectural styles that I have less experience with, and as such wanted to take the futuristic aspects of Shanghai that are somewhat overdone in mainstream scifi and apply those similar aesthetics to a middle eastern inspired setting.

With the new outfit, I wanted to mimic the neon city in which the character lives while retaining a shadowy silhouette reminiscent of an assassin of the night. I also wanted to push the androgyny of their costume as a non-binary character (giving them bisexual pride flag hair in one of the designs was unintentional but works perfectly for the character) and took inspiration from the original Tron film regarding the minimalist details of their outfit.

The final iteration I landed on after playing more with the dream theme, with both the textures and the colour scheme, leaning away from black with harsh neons to a softer pastel palette. I settled on the name "Yu" as both a Chinese name reflecting the origins of the "Baku" folklore originally as a Chinese folk tale transformed by Japanese culture, and the similarity that it holds to "Yume", the world for "Dream" in Japanese.

It's interesting, although a little frustrating to see that my style is so inconsistent and I'm hoping to make improvements to that during the course of this project.