back from the dead and lots of words

It's incredible how time flies. Or maybe just how unaware of its passing I am. It's coming on a year since my last update now, and while that's not some great tragedy, I feel like I could do better--especially in regards to my progress on my game. So I am, and so here we are.

Kitty Come Home is still very much alive. I realize that announcing that to four followers seems at least a little questionable, and that the italic stress probably didn't help much, but it's more for me than anything else. The game is still alive and perhaps even more alive than it was this time almost a year ago, honestly. A lot of things have changed, including my own expectations, and desires for the project.

For the next several of updates, I want to catalog just how wildly the game has changed since it's inception almost two years ago. A lot has changed since I originally started things up, as I have mentioned before. Speaking of things I've mentioned before, I'll start this self-aggrandizing nostalgia trip by showing the evolution of the player character sprite.

I warn you now--this will be a long post, full of half-baked, video-game/art-hipster rants. If you stay for the whole thing, I'd appreciate it you leave some spare change in the empty PBR on the counter there.

Anyway, in an earlier post, I briefly brought up the evolution of the character but pixeling her was a completely different beast, as I found, and in many ways ended up becoming a cyclic process where accidents, or changes I made while trying to make a pixel version, lead to inspiration for the pen and pencil version. This was my first true foray into pixel art, and I definitely learned some things along the way...

OMG WHO IS THIS

Because I enjoy setting nearly impossible goals, I decided that this game would be my crash course into not only pixel art, but learning how to animate. This eight frame animation is the culmination of over several weeks of work, looking at people like a maniac as they walked past, studying my own body language, and--naturally--watching cartoons.

An element I always wanted to strongly emphasis in the game was the player character. She represents the player's emotional tether to the game world, so every pixel needed to feel right. This first version just didn't accomplish that for me. While I like the color scheme (fun fact: green, purple and orange are my favorite colors), they didn't pop with some of the planned backgrounds of the levels, which would be rather dark themselves. Also, the lack of proper shading robs her of any depth--it's hard to tell that there's distance between her legs (stop it; you're better than making the obvious joke there), for example. Also, still being new at this game graphics design thing, I came to learn than using black as an outline color robs you some options as far as later color usage plays out. It also forces a certain emphasis on the 'blockiness' of the pixels, and makes it feel kind of flat. A last complaint was the hair. It was a prominent feature in her design (and a reference to another game character, which we'll touch on later). I felt that it was poorly animated, hid too much of her face, and because of its color, obscured the intended reference. And so, revision two was born!

getting closer

Nothing but an improvement in every way, as far as I'm concerned. Ditching the outline was one of the first things to go, but then it came down to colors. Choosing her color palette was one of the hardest designs of the creation process. I wanted her to look visually distinct, very quirky and eccentric, but also like she "belonged" in the game (which is quite surreal) somehow. The player needs to be seen at all times (excluding game-play-related-reasons) and the colors seems liked they popped well with the planned color palette of the game.

He left leg is darker now, so you can more easily identify that she's standing at a slight angle, which is completely pointless to point out, But The More You Know! She also has a slight bounce, which, coincidentally, was voted-in overwhelmingly by the females I asked. I only bring this up because I was initially opposed to the idea. Female sexuality in video games is handed with a disappointing lack of grace, in my opinion. Now, I actually appreciate the decision, though not for any sexual reasons or anything weird. Anyway, I didn't want the fact that the player character was female to be distracting, but wanted the fact to still be noticed. Which is sort of hard to do, a bit of a paradox, and I'll be damned if there isn't probably some social commentary in there somewhere.

You also might've noticed her posture actually changed as the sprite was revised. This was a deliberate change as I redrew her. The game has a definite story, though it's meant to be vague, and often confusing. In her original incarnation, the character is almost slumping, and I can imagine her a little downtrodden. That is exactly the kind of reaction I want the game world to have on the player, and that's why I decided it was a cheap trick to animate the player-character in such a way. 

Anyway, I tried to make the character a little more indifferent, I suppose; Give her the look of somebody just out for a normal, everyday walk, SPECIFICALLY to juxtapose with how weird, and mind bending some of the planned stages are. I want the player to be the one the says "what the fuck is going here?" at their computer; not draw a character that tells the player that they should be talking to their monitors. Which is just crazy anyway.

Here we have the "final" iteration of the character sprite. Unless I get hit by some crazy inspiration, this is the one I'm happy with it, and think works wells. Something that always bothered me was that I had trouble animating her braids, due to the pixel size and how small they were in conjunction to the rest of her face. It took completely redoing her face and hair, to make room for more features. It's incredible to me though that, in just moving around a few pixels, there is quite a bit more personality than from the one above. She even has a mouth and visible eyebrow!

Friends have suggested she was based on somebody, or that she looks familiar, but her true inspiration would be a couple of sources, actually. First and foremost, surprisingly enough, would be Link, from The Legend of Zelda. The hair, the pointy hat. It seems incredibly obvious to me, but nobody's ever picked up on it before. At any rate I wanted to give a nod to a series of games that, while not my favorite by any stretch, encapsulate something truly special--going on a huge adventure.

Lastly, her color choice was loosely inspired by Terra, from Final Fantasy XI. So there you go.

EDIT: Just as an incredibly nerdy curiosity, all of the sprites used on this post today are from the game, just blown up to exactly four times their actual size for clarity's sake.