If you’ve played Stardew Valley with an eye for romance, then here’s a topic you might have thought about: some townspeople are cuter in their conversational portraits than they are in their actual sprites. Thankfully, a fan has stepped in to right this grave injustice by redesigning character sprites to more closely resemble those close-up portraits.
On Wednesday, alijach published a series of character sprites she redesigned to look like in-game icons, posting them on Twitter and Reddit. The Reddit post climbed to the top of r/StardewValleywhere fans crouched over the designs.
The project took aliyach two days with PaintTool SAI. Figuring out how to make the character portraits look good on the smaller scale of the sprites proved to be a challenge. “[It’s] always hard to capture some important details in such a small format,” she told Polygon via Reddit chat. “Some characters’ hair and faces are more complicated to draw at that scale.”
In my humble opinion, there are a few outliers — for example, Marnie looks much cuter with her low bun to the side, rather than straight. Alex, Elliot and Robin also all benefit from a nicer haircut. Aliyach called this “difference” between the original and her design a source of joy, noting that Marnie the Wizard, Emily, and Mr. Qi were among her favourites. She told Polygon, “I like to separate those based on designs and their personality, but the ones I mention definitely [are] in my favorite group.” Aliyach also said she would be interested in revisiting some of her character sprite designs – Gus in particular – to make them look “less scary.”
A Reddit commenter said they had been “waiting for someone to make a mod based on this”, which is honestly what I was thinking too. Another commenter replied, pointing out how challenging it is to make such mods, as it requires a number of expressions and poses, including a walk cycle. But luckily, aliyach said she’s also interested in turning her designs into a mod “in the future” — hopefully that dream will come true one day.