There’s a lot here, so I’m just gonna go in order:
He was the first design I did, and my first idea for him was that he would have a nearly identical body to Zero but with altered shapes, instead I decided to focus more on keeping his distinct silhouette while incorporating smaller hints at their relation to one another.
His hair is his main shared trait with Zero, but is styled opposite to Zero’s. While Zero’s hair is very sleek and elegant and tied back, Bass cares little about his appearance and only relies on his helmet shape to keep it out of his way during fights, it’s choppy and messy and cut just short enough that it doesn’t get caught in his wings.
The wings are his most recent addition, as much original idea was that he would have a capelet that connected to his pauldron like a military general. I ended up scrapping that concept because it concealed his buster which felt out of character for him to do. Instead I went fully into a cape idea because the whole purpose was to give him an air of false grandeur, making him seem as if he’s a higher rank than he is.
His broken crystal has metaphorical and backstory significance. I’ll save the backstory part for his completed design, but the metaphorical part is the fractured skull insignia, symbolising his conflicted feelings toward Wily and the disconnect he feels to his past due to his resurrection.
My main goal with Proto was to avoid him looking too similar to Zero and retain his more streamlined, sleek shapes.
I kept his body shape in line with X’s, AKA the generic Reploid body shape (along with Quint/Rock), and I included some sharper accent pieces like his shoulder guards and his more angular knees.
His scarf is now a hologram like command mission X, which is both a way to make him fit in better with the X era aesthetics, AND represent his disconnect from the person he used to be. In the classic series, his scarf was a piece of nostalgia he held onto that reminded him of a better time in his life, now it’s been replaced by a false replica that holds no emotional value but to remind him that the life he used to reminisce on is too far away to remember clearly.
Finally, I avoided giving him a helmet so I could give him a more unique look compared to other male reploids and to make him fit in better with the other navigators in the series. The canon explanation for why his hair is somehow going grey is that it’s made from the original prototype hair fibres from his old body, which has begun to lose its colour after so long without proper care.
Although I tried to avoid it in my original concept, I decided that including aspects from Quint would work better from both a design perspective and a backstory perspective. His colours are altered to be more blue like his original Mega Man armour, but keep the green undertones for most of his armour to keep him seperate from X.
His visor is meant to give him a closer look to Proto and hide his eyes to give him an older look. Both he and Roll are around 18/19 years old (Bass and Proto are both mid twenties, closer in age to Zero and X).
His design is the most likely to change between now and his finalised design, but I’ve finally reached a point where I’m happy to continue to the next stage with his profile.
Roll was my second completed design and it took forever to get her dress and armour to a point I was happy with. While she’s supposed to be older, I wanted to maintain her sweet and girly aesthetic and focused more on making her outfit cute before I moved on to altering things to make her look older, for example I changed her hologram hair bow into two ribbons and a headband helmet instead.
I toyed with the idea of giving her a dress that was closer in shape to the one that Iris has, but found that it infantilised her design too much and didn’t work for her the same way it worked for Iris.
Her green is more yellow toned than green toned to differentiate her palette from Zero. The lack of blue tones in her palette in general is a subtle way to show the divide that has grown between her and Rock after he was reprogrammed to become Quint.
It was a challenge to properly balance her design and avoid her looking too much like Alia or Zero. Keeping her in a dress was essential to keep her from looking like Alia, and I focused more on her MM8 design to keep her colours focused in the same areas as that outfit (red dress, white/black armour)
