Characters

This devlog post is about some character ideas that were tried, and abandoned.

Early during development, the idea was to have different characters based on native Australian animals that can live in both wet/dry conditions. A shortlist was made for things like waterbirds, turtles, frogs, crocs, etc.

However, this also presented a problem. As a solo dev with a tight time frame, making all these sprites from scratch was extremely time-consuming. (especially considering my forte is programming, not art)

Below is a Magpie Goose based on public-domain artwork:

Kinda ok, but not very animated. 

Here was my attempt to convert that into an animated sprite, basically by treating the bird as a duck:

Neutral:

Up attack:

Running:

side attack (yes, it shoots fireballs for some reason)

These sprites were ultimately not used in the final version of the game, since it was simply far too time consuming to make. These images took a full day of development to make, and were still not production ready. 

To ensure the game was built in time for the deadline the characters were pivoted to be anthropomorphised anime-inspired characters based on the same 3 characters. This allowed the use of existing humanoid sprites, modified to match the them. 

It might be interesting to note that the new character portraits were built using AI. There is a public website that releases CC0 anime characters generated by a GAN artwork. Some characters were chosen this way, and adapted to be in a pixel format seen in the game's character select screen.