I can’t believe it’s been so long, it still feels like it didn’t happen too long ago. This character was actually born out of me and my high school friend wanting to write complimentary stories about two delinquent but “kingly” high school boys who just like to mess around (i.e. power rangers, skunk pranks, and pretending to be anime lawyers... or something). Here are a few pictures I retained from my high school days.

While this picture wasn’t the original concept art, I think it really portrays many facets of his younger personality. At some point, he used to have his hair parted on the left-hand side of his face.

Anyway, so this guy went through a lot of different names. His first name was Ryouji because my friend thought it would be fun to write a Japanese high school anime story, and she really wanted our characters to follow a royalty theme. Apparently, “Ryouji” means “good reign” according to some baby name websites. Then for the longest while, his name became Riley because I wanted to choose an anglicized name for the story I was writing, and it still partially kept the meaning. I still wanted the name to have the y closer to the R, so somehow it later became Ryan, which still retains the ‘king’ theme. His current name is now Leon since the character is left handed and L’s are pronounced as R’s in Japanese anyway. Right now, I think I’ll leave it as Leon or Leo since Leon means lion and lions typically are a symbol associated with kings.

Aside from his name, Leon’s appearance has gone through a lot. Here’s a picture of him as a college student for something that I wanted to write, but this concept didn’t go too far. He becomes a little more serious since the high school version of what you see above. Leon also originally wore a red jacket to pay tribute to the original name Ryouji. You’ll have to imagine the red on the jacket here, sorry...

So that picture was actually drawn right before my first or second term test in university. I was getting really anxious like many students right before a midterm, and that just... happened.

I decided to write an otome game with the college form of Leon’s character in mid-2018. That’s also where his design started to change some more. I thought blue or green suited Leon much better than red, so that’s why his outfits reflect that in the screenshot below. Leon’s hair parting has changed to the right, and his hair becomes a little more more unkempt.

You might also get a feel for his personality changes, where he becomes a lot more serious over time.

Anyway, that’ll be all for this topic for now! I also wanted to share some work I’ve been doing on a replay screen page:

I’m mostly doing the screen replay page for myself to see which scenes have music and sprites added, and which ones don’t. I thought it might be helpful to just leave it in the game when people want to re-watch a particular scene from the game, but they don’t want to go through the entire game looking for it. I also wanted to add in ‘random’ scenes that happen throughout the game, but you wouldn’t be required to replay the scenes again - you would be able to play them here.

Currently it only shows 2 chapters on the replay scene screen, but there are 5 completed chapters for Leon actually (Chapters 2-6), I just haven’t gotten around to programming them in as scene replays. His story is pretty much complete, and I don’t have any plans on actually expanding it. I look forward to when people get to read his route, along with the other love interests!