Maria Notte the Bat Reporter

These are the concepts arts I created for Maria Notte, a support character from Freedom Planet 2. She is a reporter of the Three Kingdoms Channel.

I designed over 100 NPCs for Freedom Planet 2 (although not all of them were used). Maria has the significance as the template character for the bat people in the game. In most cartoons, bat people usually have back wings instead of the anatomically correct hand wings. Even if they do have hand wings, they got heavily stylized into mascot-like proportions. In Freedom Planet 2, I decided to create more anatomically correct wings for the bats.

To make sure Maria has convincing wings, I carefully studied bat anatomy, and tried my best to find a balance point between anatomy and aesthetic. I was surprised by how different real bat wings are comparing to the most cartoon bat wings. For example, the “wing spikes” are actually fingers, and they have the same amount of joints like human hands. This was an educational experience, it taught me to be humble and always look for reference before working on something new.

The hand wings of the bats are rather inconvenient because they are prone to get in the way. But instead of changing the structure to the point of erasing their unique identity, I decided to let the FP2 bats live their lives with this disadvantage. They would invent gestures, costumes, tools that specialized to make their lives easier.

The bats in Freedom Planet 2 wear active noise-cancelling headphones to lower the ambient noise and protect their sensitive hearing. They put on sunglasses in daytime because they are nocturnal beings, their eyes can’t handle bright light. Their costumes are sleeveless and cut open on the side of the body to make way for their wing membranes. The clothing has embedded steel/plastic frames to ensure a close fit. Their shoes have hooks for them to hang on things, or to carry their luggage around because they can’t use their hands to do that.

I think Maria Notte is a very interesting character for her anatomy design alone. Her concept has a lot of potential. Maybe I will design a spirit bat character in my original project, Spirit Animals in Disguise.