Many developers enter the industry driven by passion. There is a belief that enthusiasm alone will earn recognition. In reality, that expectation does not hold for long. In many projects, what one developer wants to make or believes is right does not necessarily meet the client’s needs or fit the project’s overall structure. A writer once said that you might come up with the best joke of your life, but if it does not serve the narrative, it has to go. The same applies to art.

Our first mistake in this process was failing to clarify the client’s artistic requirements and instead assuming what the client expected. With that step in place, many of the issues could have been avoided from the start. Instead, we assumed that a remaster meant there was no need for design changes. All we had to do was replace low-poly models with more refined ones that met current technical and visual standards.

The second mistake was ignoring the historical context. When we realized we needed to redesign the character, we defaulted to a generic fantasy style. The art team spent two weeks creating what we understood as a “good-looking” character. There was nothing obviously wrong with the result. It was visually appealing, aligned with the character’s personality, and free from outdated stereotypes. What we failed to see was that it did not fit the setting. Nor did we stop to confirm whether the client wanted a stylized fantasy design or a historically grounded one. As a result, the work missed its target again. After nearly a month of rework, we finally clarified what should have been established from the beginning: the character needed to be redesigned with a grounded approach, based on a 5th-century setting.

These issues set the art schedule back by a considerable margin. They also forced us to scale down from three planned characters to two. At the same time, this became one of the most valuable lessons we could take from working in a school setting: what you want to make is not always what should be made, and clear communication matters more than anything else in the development process.