I like the minimalist current way. It is like a book where you read the basics details and your mind fill the rest.
If you try to add more details, you would need to go full high resolution, as there is not much room for middle ground details. Those will either look like it is a bad design in high resolution, or a noise/polluted low resolution design.
We already have eyebrows. I think they were just pondering on the idea of having them animated to help expressing emotions. Here a full team with eyebrows:
there are two options for facial hair on the male hearthlings when you create a new game. One without eyebrows and one with, so just try and scroll through them next time you make a new group of settlers
Hmm, I think that the whiteness thing is a good idea, because it would be cool to have different hearthling eye colors…
I don’t know how well this would work, but how about a really narrow rim around the eyes? (Like, half a pixel or something.) The way I see it, this would still look really minimalistic, but it would allow for eye expression and different eye colors.
Players don’t like change, and I think this option isn’t really necessary. I have to be honest @Stmpnk his/her characters look really sick! Though I don’t think it would be a good idea to change them now.
If you look at the twitter portraits of Tom & Tony you can see some early prototypes of the game models which they made in to their own likenesses - which include whites of eyes:
Subsequent iterations saw them go for the blacked out eyes - possibly so that they could express emoticon style emotions such as:
Not sure whether or not this is still planned though.
I love how the eyes look in your images . Pupils with just different shades and highlights works too, even without the sclera!
Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of hearthlings portraying emoticon-emotions in both official and fan arts (ex: the female hearthling in one of stonehearth’s earliest videos, and the image by @Froggy above). And it had me thinking in the past, till now on how they are going to implement it if ever? Are they going to use a sort of animated 2D sprite over the hearthlings’ face or animated voxels instead ?
I can see what you mean . Plain black strips as eyes really fits the hearthlings the way they are, and the two top models still retain that ‘plainness’. But in my experience with the sort of style I applied: Huge eyes, plain pupil with sclera, it gave me a sort of dead feeling (Maybe it’s just me?). That’s why I made the other two models below. But I’m glad you like it, I hope the lighter-grayish voxel on the lower part of the pupil decrease the feeling I felt .