The base roster of Invincible Vs will consist of Invincible, Omni-Man, Atom Eve, Bulletproof, Rex Splode, Lucan, Monster Girl, Thula, Battle Beast, Cecil Stedman, Robot, Anissa, Powerplex, Dupli-Kate, Allen the Alien, Titan, Ella Mental and Conquest, finalizing the initial character count at 18. The Immortal, Universa and two more mysterious fighters will later join the roster as the first wave of DLC.
It’s interesting to note that Ella Mental is particularly unique since she’s designed as an original character specifically for Invincible Vs. In other words, she doesn’t actually appear in the comics or animated television series.
Game Informer recently had an interview with Dan Eder, art director at Quarter Up and former artist for MultiVersus. At one point, he was asked about the unique circumstances surrounding Ella Mental considering that she was an original character for the game.
Of course, she was still ultimately designed by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker, the writers behind the Invincible series. Apparently, her design was about 90 percent done by the time Dan Eder got to do anything with her, but there was still room to add some details.
“Yeah, I think she was about 90 percent of the way there. She looked like she does now, but we definitely added a few bells and whistles again, for the sake of making her look interesting in the context of the game, right?” said Eder on the subject.
“So the overall character, the backstory, the shape language, the facial features were pretty much the same. But yeah, as far as the costume goes, there was definitely a little bit of back and forth to make sure that she feels complete from a conceptual standpoint.”
The interviewer then wondered if Ella Mental would be trickier to design compared to other fighters in Invincible Vs. Comparably, every other fighter had source material that could be referenced in terms of their movements and animations.
“I thought it was liberating, actually, because we could do our own thing. I think with a lot of other characters, we didn’t want to deviate too much,” said Eder.
“Because, look at Rex, for example; people know Rex, and they love him. We weren’t going to change anything significantly.”
“I think with Ella, because she’s new, we had a bit more wiggle room there, so we could chime in on certain visual elements that have evolved over time, from how we portray her elements, for example, through certain facial features that have evolved; when we took it from concept to 3D there’s always a little bit of an evolution. The same goes for all of our other characters, but I think with Ella, even more so, because you have never seen her in 3D form, you’ve never had other angles other than the ones that we got from Cory, which was just a sketch.”
Though the art team did end up making a few changes to Ella Mental, Cory was apparently easy to work with in this regard.
“And again, luckily, we did change certain things, but I think ‘refined’ is the word. Not necessarily changed, but we refined a lot of things that were a little bit ambiguous in the concept. And luckily, Cory was fully on board. He loved it. He even embraced it. When he did his own variant, which he recently posted, he actually used the updated design that we did for the game,” continued Eder.
“So as you can see, there’s a lot of back and forth, right? It’s not like, ‘Hey, you did this. I’m going to do my own thing.’ It’s ‘How can we learn from each other and adopt certain elements, no pun intended, that are gonna work for both of us.'”