Unsurprisingly, most video game studios are awful at designing black female characters. Apparently creating only brooding white dudes with flat dark hair and stubble for your entire career makes doing literally anything else seem hard. Video game companies, even with millions of dollars and man hours, have yet to substantially tackle natural black hair, which has curls and textures unlike anything a brooding white protagonist has ever seen. Thus, the little representation there is often inaccurate, or restricted to one or two mainstream black hair types.

While other games have featured black female characters with afros (some worryingly comical, some realistic), cropped cuts, and dreadlocks; none have succeeded in depicting Type 4 hair — the tightly coiled, natural texture that’s common among black women.

Campo Santo, the studio known for Firewatch the gorgeous first-person game set in the Wyoming wilderness, aims to change that. Its next project, In the Valley of Gods, features a black female protagonist named Zora with natural Type 4 hair. The game’s lead artist, Jane Ng, describes the importance of accurately representing this common hair texture in a blog post on the design process.

“Hair is very personal,” writes Ng. “As an immigrant woman of Chinese descent with atypically frizzy wavy hair, my hair is, to an extent, an outward expression of my struggle with who I am and where I belong (or don’t). I want to love my hair the way it naturally is, but it’s never quite simple as that.”

Deeply moved at seeing the work and iteration @thatJaneNg and @camposanto are putting in to get black hair right for In the Valley of the Gods https://t.co/j3L9dBUQyepic.twitter.com/Wl5p60dS1X — Evan Narcisse (@EvNarc) March 11, 2018

Ng and the team at Campo Santo painstakingly designed Zora’s hair geometry from the ground up, using a combination of hair cards and hair helmets in order to achieve a natural look. “A hair helmet is what I call completely opaque geometry,” writes Ng, “as one would see on a plastic action figure or Lego figurine. Hair cards, on the other hand, use many sheets of hair strands to portray more free-flowing hair — think many characters in Uncharted 4. That approach is well suited to hair types that can be abstracted into sheets, which works well for any length of straight hair.”

By using a variant of the standard hair card — which Ng described as “big tubes” that follow the shape of the hair helmet — the designers were able to properly texturize Zora’s hair in a manner that allowed for both movement and stability. As while Type 4 hair is made up of tight, upward growing curls, it’s also undeniably light and fluffy.

Making sure that her hair properly interacted with light was the final challenge for the team. Ng said that they added individual controls to ensure that Zora’s hair appropriately responded to a number of different lighting cues and the result is stunning.

What’s more, all of this design work was merely for the game’s trailer — which was shown at the 2017 Game Awards — not even the game itself. So, there will likely be a number of tweaks to Zora’s hair in the final product, whenever it ends up being released.

“There is a long way to go before we’re truly happy with Zora’s hair,” writes Ng, “but this is a good first step. As the rest of the game’s visuals become more solidified, it will become more clear what we need to tackle next.”