Meet the avatar which will accompany you on your journey through Brainworth's vast island network. Armed to the teeth with a jetpack and casual hover, our aim was to create a character which could be animated to be given some believable humanity, while at the same time not giving them too much personality.

Our character artist Ray explains: "When Ben and I designed the player avatar, we wanted to build it around the idea of he or she being a (fairly futuristic) planetary explorer."

"We wrestled with the idea of the avatar being a scientist or a soldier (earlier examples of the concepts for both those characters can be seen in this blog post), but in the end we decided on neither. We didn't want the player to look like a menacing soldier, but similarly we didn't want it looking as though they could only survive indoors."

"In the end, we settled on being an explorer - somewhere in between."

Viewed from the rear, the avatar will hover around the screen, floating and flying from one island or challenge to the next, reacting to your successes and failures in a multitude of ways and anchoring the player to a surrogate which can embody their success. The key was to try and create a character which felt human enough that players could establish a link, while not creating them as a specific person so the avatar can relate, albeit slightly, to each and every player.

I used a neutral set of colour palettes," Ray continues. "The ideas has been that at some point down the track, users will be able to customise their avatars including the suit's colours. Going for something less stark made it more malleable."

We'll have moving footage of our avatar out the door in no time at all.

Be sure to sign up for the upcoming beta on the home page if you're enjoying our developments so far!