Every Day We Fight - Dr. Selena Faber

The design for an important story character in Every Day We Fight, Dr. Selena Faber. Faber is the catalyst for the main plot of the game, the creator of the technology that made it possible for the alien Rifter threat to find the world of our characters, and begin their nightmarish resource exploitation.

The brief established her as a cold, eccentric genius. A late middle-aged woman, she is able to make conceptual and technological connections no one else can. Blind from birth, she wears large shaded glasses to hide her eyes. Despite this, she became a brilliant inventor, and designed her own devices to allow her to interact with the world. Her past is rather mysterious though, with few records of her life before founding Faber Labs, the pre-eminent hi-tech research firm of Every Day We Fight.

As for her design, I initially explored many tropes of the Mad Scientist archetype, merging them with the 1930s aesthetics of Everyday We fight, and drawing on historic women scientists as inspiration. As we progressed, we advanced her look forward to something more mid-century, to communicate how ahead of her time she is. We also found that she worked better the more androgynous she looked, as if she cared nothing for fashion or the expectations of the society around her.

As players discover, there is more to her than what is seen (or not seen) on the surface.