Matt and I design the villagers together. He is the actual artist, though. What I do is that I give him direction on what I want (sometimes I just give broad adjectives, sometimes I give him tribal pictures from books or the internet). Most of the time he tries to recreate my vision and some of them are from his own creative vision. On my side, I do a lot of research and read a lot of books. Arthur and I also traveled to a couple of islands.
