For those that love Minecraft and would like to add sequel characters to the mix — including Rey, Kylo Ren, and Unkar Plutt — then you’re in luck! The Star Wars Sequel Skin Pack, available for $2.99, was released last week and features both popular and obscure characters from the two latest films in the Star Wars saga. The pack includes two free skins, General Armitage Hux and Tallie Lintra, and a total of 53 new character designs.
StarWars.com caught up (via e-mail) with some of the talented folks behind these Star Wars skins — lead artist Michael Hansen and artist Christopher Reeves of developer 4J Studios — about translating our favorite characters, good and bad, into Minecraft‘s familiar blocky look, the challenges, and some tips on building Star Wars settings.
StarWars.com: When it came to taking characters from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi and adapting them into Minecraft form, what was the biggest challenge? It seems like it must be somewhat difficult, considering the simplified Minecraft aesthetic.
Michael Hansen: Star Wars has a wide spectrum of character designs, each with their own unique feature that makes them stand out from each other. The challenge for this pack, I would say, is finding that feature, small or large, and making that core to the overall design. Human characters for example, re-creating their unique facial features and expression to read well in only an 8×8 pixel space can be really tough. Using Kylo Ren as an example, it can boil down to simply the placement of the mouth. Ultimately, we made it 2 pixels wide and placed it at the lowest position possible; this allowed the face to appear longer than the others and to help illustrate his brooding personality.
As for the biggest challenge, alien skins are always a mind teaser because of their very organic design features. The key here is to focus on getting the overall silhouette blocked out and readable. Since we can add extra geometry to our skins, we can get fairly close without breaking the Minecraft feel.
Read the full interview here.
