Portrait of a Character

Hello it’s October and the great Hiberan art refresh continues.  Last month I talked about the changes we made to the dialogue layouts and as a part of that, we’ve been updating all the portraits in the game. Some are getting more of an update than others, but almost all of them are getting at least a small tweak.

Some of the portraits in the game are brand new and some have been with us since the early days. I wanted to show off this character who’s been with the game since the beginning.

Noona, as she is now

This is Noona, and she’s one of the Athan flying knights, but she wasn’t always like that.  In the early days of the game she was…. Well everyone. I only had one portrait so everyone was her, and she was a brunette.  Her portrait comes to us from True Ref who has a fantastic set of reference photos and models for artists.

Noona, when she was everyone in the game

A little later on I was trying to establish the palette for the game and that went through a few iterations and along the way she was repainted. Around that time her name was Jaan and she was the early promote mentor figure for whatever our protagonist was at the time.

Noona, when she was Jaan

Still later I finally did manage to settle on a palette for the game, and around the same time I figured out the “target resolution” for the game. Hibera pretends to be 360x240 to give it that retro feel. Of course it plays at higher resolution and we do a lot of effects that you couldn’t possibly do at true 360x240 but we still try to maintain that feel everywhere possible and especially in the UI. So the portrait of Jaan had to get re-painted once again.

Noona, as Jaan but more recently

Around this time Jaan dropped out of the build, we were focusing on Maebh’s party for the demo and she was on the other team, so it wasn’t until recently that her portrait was added back in under the new role of Noona and I made a few little tweaks to help her match the other portraits.

New Noona, who dis?

Of course this is not the only character that’s been through a bunch of iterations, here’s a few notables that have seen quite a few changes since the early days.

Not every character has had their full glow up dialogue portrait completed so that’s why you’re seeing them at lots of different resolutions.


It’s very exciting to see all this new art go into the game, and I’m incredibly excited to share it with you, so I’m planning to put out an art update for the demo at some point in the near future.  I’ve also had some very nice people send in feedback through the feedback form in the demo and I have some requested Quality of Life features to add as well, such as faster scrolling when you hold down a direction, and a settings menu screen showing all the controls.  More info on that to come!

Until then.