helllo sir,,,
i am passionate 3d artist and making game ready characters from last two years, from this 2 years i have learned lots of things about most important things in making creatures characters is anatomy, i have creating good anatomy for male, female, creature, animal.
and my pipeline for this is first making low base, highpoly with full details then convert to lowpoly, opening uvs, and applying all the detais of the highpoly to lowpoly via normal map, ao, cavity, curvature, before giving you the final character with all the maps, i am gonna first render it on marmoset so yu wilget exact idea hows your characters looks on your desired game engine like unity, or unreal or any other you are using, i will provide the quality both for the pc game and also for mobile version.
i have attached my current creature work,
one is progressive and other one is done in past for pc game clients