When designing player characters, my initial focus was on “substitution.” To avoid overly prominent characters, I deliberately designed it to be an ordinary person who looks like it can be seen everywhere – walking through ten people on the street, maybe eight of them all look like this. This “featureless” treatment is not to create personality, but to minimize the presence of the character itself, making it easier for players to project themselves into it.

But the last time the teacher talked about it, I didn’t necessarily need a role. To be honest, I don’t really agree, characters are a must, after all, this is an RPG adventure game (if according to the steam tag), and anyway, I must need a “thing” to represent the player walking around the map. But it really inspired me – I don’t necessarily need a decent person, I can be like A Chamber of Stars. What players really need in the system may not be a complete character image, but just an existence that can move around the map, be recognized and recorded by the system.

This awareness made me rethink the necessity of the role. Rather than designing a character that was as ordinary as possible but still had a clear human form and identity hint, I began to think about whether I could completely abandon the concept of “character” in favor of a more abstract vector. As presented in A Room Full of Stars, players do not necessarily need to simulate a person to gain the experience, but can enter the system through a more vague and impersonal way of being.

This change is not a simple art adjustment, but directly affects my understanding of substitution. Substitution does not necessarily come from “who am I”, but may come from “am I allowed to exist and move in this system”. When the character is no longer emphasized as a specific person, the player’s attention also shifts from the character identity to how the system responds to their very existence.

In terms of visual style selection, I gradually realized that collage expression was more in line with the overall structure of the project than a unified style. The collage does not try to hide the inconsistency, but allows elements of different origins and different logic to exist juxtaposed. This juxtaposition does not naturally point to a whole, quickly understandable world, but makes the cracks and incongruities themselves visible.

For me, this chaos does not represent “untidy”, but an unorganized state. Just like the results that the system presents when interpreting player behavior, meaning is not generated all at once, but is constantly disassembled, reassembled, and put together. And the collage is very malleable, and I plan to make the collage more and more sloppy and more burrs as the plot progresses, so as to hint at the emotional changes of the protagonist

But after consideration, I don’t think my game is suitable for the collage style.

In the choice of visual style, I have considered collage-like expression because it can visually present chaos and breakage. However, after repeatedly comparing the core experience of the project, I realized that this approach could expose anomalies in the system prematurely.

My game relies more on a “close-to-reality” look: players make serious judgments in a superficially believable, reasonable world, and the system’s recordings and misreadings emerge under this normality. If the visual language itself already suggests the instability of the world, then this tension will be difficult to establish. Therefore, I chose to keep the representation closer to reality, allowing system-level inconsistency to be the main source of conflict.

I want players to believe first that this is a believable real-life environment: furniture, room structures, and items are all from everyday experience, with no obvious stylized cues, just like in Rue Valley.

However, this reality is not neutral. The clues, traces, and systematized information accumulated in the space make it more like a slice of reality that has already been recorded, analyzed, and interpreted. Man still exists in it, but no longer the center of meaning, but is surrounded by the logic of the environment and the system. This approach allows me to introduce systematic intervention in behavior without destroying the sense of reality, so that the sense of unease gradually emerges from the “seemingly normal” world.

In character design, I adopted a “head substitution” approach: preserving the human body structure and proportions to maintain a sense of realism, but replacing the head with patterns or objects. This treatment is not intended to create a sense of weirdness, but rather to deliberately diminish the character’s existence as an understandable individual.

The head usually takes on the function of recognizing emotions and identities, and when this part is replaced, the character is still in action, but no longer provides a clear psychological entrance. Important NPCs in my game are also designed in this form, while other unimportant NPCs (such as passers-by, crowds) are designed in the form of silhouettes