I'm working on a game that has a lot of dialog. It has a dialog system similair to Phoenix Wright, where the characters appear onscreen when they talk, either in sprite form or as a 3d model. Usually there's mouth and eye animations as well, and their facial expressions change depending on the context of the scene.
Here's my problem: I suck at drawing. Like, massively. I enjoy writing dialog and I already have lots of dialog written down. I even made a little program for myself, which mimics how the dialog would play out in my game. Something that I don't enjoy doing, however, especially when I implement the dialog into my game, is have tags everywhere that describe the characters mood/expression instead of showing it visually. Example:
John: mostly neutral, slightly worried How was your day?
Jane: sad Not so great...
Even in the prototype stage, I would like something more... visual, to convey the scene better to everyone else and really get the right mood and expression of the character across. That way, it would be easier for the future artist to draw the necessary poses, expressions, animations, etc. for each character.
What I would like to do is have placeholders of blank (mostly featureless) characters that have lots of different expressions to convey what I want the character to look like in that situation. I'm not asking where to find something like that, I simply want to know if there is some sort of game developer jargon/term for this kind of thing (animated or still), so I can narrow down my search a little.