I spent last week refining the visual style of the game. The environment is going to be in the woods, so lot of nature elements. Accordingly I'm doing some experiments to make a good hero (the phantom). I thought of raccoon as a protagonist when I watched Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko on Netflix recently. Here's a scene I composed to test my environment ideas. Also drawing a cute raccoon character didn't take much time (about a day).

I also spent some time in trying out Unity's 2d animation packages to create my character rigs. However they turned out to be more of a hassle. The most important problem is while doing symmetric animations like walk or run cycles, I don't get mirror pose functionality with this package. In my home-grown animation solution, I've written a custom script to achieve this. It's a huge time saver and reduces lot of frustration. So I'm going to stick to my solution for character rigs.

I drew the new raccoon character in Krita, instead of Inkscape. I applied several techniques I learnt from drawing environment assets to make it pop-out. Without those techniques, the dark gray body of the character looks very flat and dull.

I've been playing Desperados-3 a lot too. I'm trying to solve all its missions without using guns. That's more likely how it will be in Phantom Behind. In fact a true stealth game mechanic shouldn't have weapons like guns. In fact, it's very likely that the Phantom won't be able to kill anyone, he can only knock them out, which will take that enemy unit out of action for certain time. However it's desirable to a player to permanently eliminate the enemy by killing them. Desperados has a really nice mechanic to achieve this by not killing. After knocking the enemy out you can tie them up and hide them into the bushes so that other enemy units don't spot and release them later. This permanently eliminates that enemy from interfering with the hero's tactics in future, yet it avoid killing. This goes hand-in-hand with my idea of a cute protagonist, like the raccoon here. (Only the raccoon is missing a tail for now, I'll add it soon)