Character Design — Design Codex

What it is. The fiction half of a cast: giving each character a silhouette, a role you can read, and a one-trait voice so the whole roster separates at a glance. system-unit-rosters handles what they do; this handles who they are.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. The player names their favorites before the tutorial ends. A crowded screen still parses because every body is a different shape. Recognition is the first loyalty — you can’t love a unit you can’t tell apart from the one beside it.

The kit

Three levers, in priority order. Silhouette first because it survives distance, motion blur, and a 32px sprite.

Lever	The question	Fails when
Silhouette	Blacked out, can I still name them?	Everyone’s a humanoid in a different hat
Role tell	Does the look promise the verb?	Healer looks like the bruiser
Voice	One adjective, everywhere	Six characters, one personality

The order is the discipline. A gorgeous face on a same-shaped body loses; a crude shape that reads at a thumbnail wins. See pattern-readability.

Vectors / options

Shape language — round / square / triangle. Round = friendly, soft, support. Square = stable, tanky, slow. Triangle = fast, sharp, aggressive. Overwatch casts almost entirely by silhouette; Team Fortress 2 you can name from a black cutout.
Palette slot — one hue owns each character. When the roster shares a world palette, identity lives in the accent, not the whole body. Ties into world-aesthetic-direction and world-faction-identity.
Prop / motif — a single carried object (Reaper’s cloak, Peashooter’s leaf) does the work of a paragraph of lore. See world-motif-and-symbol.
Posture / gait — idle stance and walk cycle read before the model does. A hunched idle telegraphs “coward unit” before a stat sheet.
Voice trait — one word: smug, weary, manic. Every line, name, and animation obeys it. Hades gives each character exactly one register and never wavers. See world-naming-and-tone.

Twist seams

Characters but their look encodes their mechanics (mechanic-swap) — the silhouette is the tooltip. In Into the Breach a mech’s shape tells you its move; in Slay the Spire the enemy’s pose telegraphs its intent. Design the body backward from the verb — spikes mean it hits, a shell means it blocks. Read distinct from decorative. Pairs with system-telegraphs and anchor-into-the-breach.
Roster but every member is a recolor with a different verb (constraint) — one base body, N palettes, N verbs. Vampire Survivors and classic shmup fleets thrive here: the shape is shared, the color + behavior carries identity. Cheap to author, brutal to keep readable — lean hard on accent hue and motion. See system-unit-rosters and anchor-vampire-survivors.

Method

List the verbs first. Before any look, write what each character does — one sentence. Look serves verb, not the reverse. If two characters share a verb, one of them is redundant; cut or differentiate now.
Assign a shape. Round / square / triangle per role. No two adjacent roster slots share a shape and a palette.
Silhouette-test at a thumbnail. Black out the roster and name each. Any collision = redesign the loser, don’t tweak. This is the gate; pattern-readability is the law it enforces.
Hang one motif each. A single prop, mark, or asymmetry. Resist the second. Detail is not identity — a distinct detail is.
Write one voice adjective per character. Then draft two lines of dialogue that could only be them. If another character could say it, the voice isn’t set.
Encode the role in the look. Attacker looks sharp, defender looks solid, support looks soft. Let the body promise the verb from step 1 — the twist seam above is this step turned up to eleven.
Stress-test the crowd. Put the whole roster on one screen, in motion, at real density. If it turns to soup, you over-detailed. Return to step 3.

Aesthetic hook (Regalia / JUDGE)

The Regalia palette rewards this discipline. Flat duotone fills and a small hue set mean silhouette and one accent do nearly all the work — there’s no gradient noise to hide behind.

Register per character. Give each character one accent from the Regalia set; the shared ink binds them to the world, the accent separates them. This is faction-identity thinking at the individual scale — see world-faction-identity.
Ink-line silhouette. A clean edge over a flat fill is the readability test passing. If the cutout is ambiguous, the design is.
Static and deterministic. Character variation is authored, not random — no per-frame jitter deciding who’s who. Keep view-only flourishes cosmetic so identity lives in the stable, hashed state, not the paint.
Motion as identity. A gait or idle authored as a small tween reads before the sprite resolves. The sandboxes/anim-lab is where a single such motion lives in isolation — study one there before you animate a cast.

The proof is visual: the vision judge in design/JUDGE.md looks at a headless render and asks whether the roster separates. If it can’t tell two characters apart, neither can the player.

Traps

Detail over readability. The cardinal sin. Ornate armor, rich texture, a busy backstory — none of it survives a 32px thumbnail in a crowded fight. Silhouette first, always. A character the player can’t parse mid-combat may as well not exist. See antipattern-unreadable-juice.
Same body, different hat. Palette-and-prop swaps on one humanoid shape read as one character to a new player. If the recolor-roster seam is your plan, over-invest in accent hue and motion or it collapses into sameness.
Look lies about the verb. A soft, round healer-shaped body that actually hits hardest violates the promise the look made. Honesty is a covenant — see pattern-fairness-and-trust and antipattern-input-lie.
One voice, cloned. Six characters who all quip the same way are one character wearing six skins. If you can swap two characters’ lines with no loss, the voices aren’t distinct.
Lore as identity. A dense codex entry is not a character. Identity is what reads in play — shape, accent, motif, one voice trait. The backstory is garnish; ship it in world-narrative-delivery, not in the silhouette.
Designing from the corpus. Don’t survey existing casts for a look. Decide the verbs, then the shapes. Reference games sharpen a principle; they are not a menu — see process-the-twist.