We are not ashamed to admit that we have been hard at work on A Star Story for over 2 years. The game that we have recently revealed to the world is a far cry from the initial game that we set out to make, and that's something we couldn't be happier about! Over the two years developing the engine and the art style for A Star Story we have managed to hone our craft and pin down the parts we cared about most to laser focus all of our time to our new vision. 

Here I'm gonna show you guys a bit of the progress that we have made of the past couple of years in regards to main characters and their sprites. Some characters like Dom have just gotten updates while Toby and Nadia underwent drastic changes to end up somewhere that we feel happy with them.

Here's a GIF of Dom's evolution that will be shown later in a chart alongside Toby and Nadia:

Dom went through 1 major restructuring and another later facial restructuring before being hit with many color and outline adjustments to end up where he is now.

Here's the chart that includes the others:

We've known from the start of development that the game would focus heavily on the friendship between Dom and Toby and as such their sprites were started a long time before Nadia's would be. Over time a greater focus was placed on creating unique and recognizable silhouettes for each character.  Nadia is the most recent addition to the main team.

Another conclusion that we came to after a long time going back and forth the value of 8 directional movement. In the end we decided that being able to represent our characters in a psuedo-3D look would be worth it for the main characters, with other characters having directions when needed.