To Pupil or Not to Pupil

This is a place where we ask the big, difficult, fraught questions. Like, will our characters have pupils in their eyes? Wildermyth does not use pupils, and I think this was absolutely the right choice. The problem with pupils is that they need to point somewhere, and if they're pointing in the wrong place, it's distracting, confusing, etc.

The chance of having a pupil pointing in the right place even most of the time in procedurally-generated interactions between procedurally-generated characters--which are theoretically going to be deep and emotional--is basically zilch, assuming I draw them in manually for each eye/expression.

You could go as neutral as possible with pupil placement. Not quite "thousand yard stare," but just always assume somebody's focusing a few feet in front of them, except for certain expressions like "guilt" or "dismissive" where they might be looking another direction. But would that like, debuff the expressiveness that you could get out of someone? I dunno. Maybe not.

I guess there's TECHNOLOGY that could be deployed if we had to have pupils. Like, the eyes would be a mask and you'd move the pupils around within them for every shot. That sounds... hard to make look good. And still doesn't solve the problem that you don't know if you're looking deep into the eyes of a tall vs. short conversation partner. (Will our people have different heights? Probably?) A lot of this depends though on whether you can see both your character and the NPC they're talking to at the same time. I like that idea, because you can see them reacting to each other simultaneously. But it also creates some weird issues if you want a group conversation. Maybe this part is moot too.

I like pupil-less. I like beady eyes, whatever color you end up using with them. They abstract things just enough that your brain fills in all the little subtleties of whatever their face should be doing to match what they're saying. I just worry about falling into the same visual conventions for faces that I used in Wildermyth. And Wildermyth had pretty expressive characters, I'm proud of that, but I'm super insecure about the art being described as "simple," "cartoony," "childlike" again. That kind of thing.

I want the face art to accommodate the depth of the characters without being misleading about it in a marketing screenshot, which is what I feel like might have happened in Wildermyth.