If you haven't already, please check out our game "Pulling Teeth"!
Hey all! My name is Heather (Deprecat) and I was the lead artist and writer for our submission "Pulling Teeth" - a game where you play as a tooth fairy seeking to speed up his path to retirement by maximizing his harvest of teeth through cavities and gummies.
I wanted to take a moment to talk about my process for designing our main character for the game. This was my first LD working in a team, so I had extra time to focus on building a character and environment and really solidify the overall look of the game.
First sketches
When the theme was announced, the three of us got to work in brainstorming an idea that we would feel comfortable jumping into, while also trying to find a unique spin on the theme itself, as I believe we all felt the collective concern of not wanting our game to be too related to crops or farming. While there's definitely nothing wrong with a literal interpretation, it wasn't the direction we found the most fun.
If I had to offer one major tip for finding a fun idea in a jam, it's this - your first idea is probably the same as everyone else's, so don't settle for your first thought. Humans think pretty homogenously at the start of an idea, but you can diverge from those initial thoughts if you give yourself a little more time to think things through. So if you want to take a little risk and try a take on the theme that not many will have thought of, just write as many of your initial ideas down as you can. Eventually you'll get the low-hanging fruit out of your system and just have the weirder ideas that take some time to conceive fully. It may make brainstorming take a little longer, but you may find the effort worth it!
And even if you do just go with your initial gut instinct, you'll feel more confident in that choice if you explored other options.
So a few idea pitches in, we started to explore the concept of a tooth fairy.

I had made the point that - for this to feel in the spirit of a harvest - that you couldn't just focus on collecting teeth. At that point, it just feels like stealing, not harvesting. A harvest implies effort put into the creation of the resource. You reap what you sow.
That's how we arrived at the idea of two separate gameplay cycles, day and night. This also meant that my character would have to appear in two different forms. He'd be disguised as a "human" during the day while managing his shop and luring in children with sweets, then at night he would remove his disguise to collect his bounty.

What an innocent face! You'd trust this man, right?

You can see some early concepts here, such as security signs and dog houses signifying the difficulty of the house to break into, and being caught would be a lot sillier
In my sketches I wanted to lean into a much creepier tooth fairy, which isn't an uncommon trope in most creepypastas these days, but since his actions are so morally questionable, I didn't think making him too cute would suit the overall vibe.
Disguised Form
I got to work in Affinity Designer (A similar, cheaper tool to Adobe Illustrator) and started shaping out the character.

I wanted his face to be toothless, since it seemed like a tooth fairy shouldn't have any teeth of their own. But I wanted the sharpness to the face, similar to depictions of kappa's in Japanese myth with their beaks, but also inspired by the pointed mouth and large eyes of Momo the ubume.

I wasn't originally going to give him pupils, just large eyes like a fly, but found that white pupils worked well to both add a little spark of life while also being creepy on their own, since light pupils have a very strange quality to them, without feeling like they're piercing you as dark pupils might.

Oh lawd
I started with the naked human form first as I knew it would essentially be his fairy form forced into an upright position versus his normal fetal-position stance. The long fingers and uncomfortably slumped shoulders started feeling like Salad Fingers, which I thought was a nice visual similarity without feeling too close. Once I had a good idea of his overall shape, I dressed him up for his new job.

True Form
Now that the day-time form is done, I needed to make his true form. This was easy enough as it just took removing the clothes and scrunching his form into a little ball. I accentuated the rib-cage and gave him some big, taloned feet that I felt would lean more into a demonic or bird-like appearance. Overall though, I just wanted him to look like a "silly little guy"

I don't remember if it was my idea or another's on the teams to make his wings look like teeth (y'all can correct me if I'm misremembering) but it was brilliant either way. The blood stains added some color to the otherwise flushed body colors, and kept with the red and blue color scheme of the day cycle, only now the balance was more shifted to the blues.

Once he was all done, I broke his body up into pieces and got him ready for rigging! I'm grateful I had time to animate this boy since it really helped to bring him alive.

Thanks for reading!