Calm, calculated, professional... Emcy is everything you need in a secret agent. That's why we hired her.
- The Archives, 2025
When we started the design of Emcy, we knew she needed to be awesome. She was our badass main character, the secret agent that our players would need to become in order to solve the mystery put in front of them. She needed to be attractive, but not too generic; cool and spunky, but not too casual. She was the professional of the detective duo, where Leo was more of a jokester. We were wary of making her too serious, however, since that was Lady Prim’s department, and so we added some small elements of imperfection to make her more relatable to the less stoic people in the audience. Like her large round earrings, for example.
When I started on Emcy’s design, my primary concern was her face. I’ve always been a bit more focused on the faces of characters (I’m not much of a fashion expert, so attire tends to be a future me problem) so I figured that was where I’d start here too. I wanted to see if I could capture that rebellious young perfectionist combination; I settled on more of the “professional perfectionist” than the rebellious. (We also had Rebecca to fill the role of rebel, after all. So many characters!) With that taken care of and approved by the team, I moved on to outfits.
I worked alongside Femke for the outfits, exchanging sketches and ideas as we worked out the iterations further and further. I’ve included my own sketches below, if you’re interested in seeing Femke’s work I’d recommend checking out the project’s Instagram page.
As you can see, this particular design involved a LOT of trenchcoat drawings xD. We wanted a shape that would give us a distinct silhouette, while also holding on to the recognizable trenchcoat shape; a staple of detectives and secret agents, after all. Eventually we settled on a design inspired by file tabs and pen nibs, two objects we deemed very detective-y that also gave us repeating patterns and shapes to work with. All that was left to do then was figure out the colour; I will readily admit that most of the credit there goes to Femke. I tend to work in more desaturated palettes, as you can see in the sketches, but the final design needed to be rather bright to match the rest of the game’s style. And so at long last, we ended up here;
While this isn’t 100% true to the final style just yet, it marks the end of my work as character designer; now it’ll go on to posing before finally being drawn in the final style. Due to the small size of our team we don’t have a detailed character sheet, otherwise I’d have shared that here too. Either way I’m very happy with how it turned out and I can’t wait to see the final version! But for now, on to the next character– many more await ;).
Project: Agent Emcy
Team: Lex, Femke & I
Software: Procreate