Character Designs and Pivoting

It's that time again! Even if there is no real schedule for this yet....But that's besides the point.

Today I am going to be talking about the player character, some steps in the design process of the character, a little gif to show off some iterations, and an unfortunate pivot I had to make, but it's better to make the "drastic" changes now in development, rather than way later on when a lot more stuff is implemented.

Right, so, first up, The Player Character

Meet the character you will be playing as in Singular Event, Raven:

Here is the front and site views of this gun arm toting, power armour wearing character. It took a fair bit of time to get to these sprites, just learning pixel art over the last little while, made it quite the challenge, but we got there in the end.

Being a "preque"l to a project I was working on previously, the overall design of Raven has actually been really refined here. Working within the constraints of GB Studio was actually quite liberating and I was able to really pin down overall designs and things to focus on. Specifically speaking of, the asymmetrical design of the shoulders and arms, which was figured out before, but really solidified here, which is why we also have a Left and Right sprite done up. I could have easily done one sprite and just flipped it to save on tiles, but almost as if I need to push the limits of every project I work on, I've taken the challenge of having both sides done up for a rather large sprite for the Game Boy. Other areas of note as you'll see in a moment, the starting helmet was figured out along with the "belt" around the waist, which was meant to hold some Grenades for you to use, but alas, the limits of GB Studio strike again and a slight pivot had to be made...

Talking it over with some of the amazing people over in the GB Studio Discord, I deemed it not really worth it to try and wrestle getting you to be able to throw Grenades. It's certainly doable, but keeping within the DMG limits (Original Game Boy, not Color) it would quite risky for overall feel, so I decided to ditch that power up. (By the way, you collect power ups)

But it wasn't all for not, as I was able to add in a power up which I was planning on doing in the original version of this game, and actually....It made me really excited to have it in here. I wanted the grenades to be a sort of "staple" for Raven, and they certainly will be in the future, but this other power up, which I will talk about in another log, fits in quite nice and as I said, I'm excited for it, and to show you want it is, however for now here's a final gif of a pseudo design process. Enjoy.




Thank you all so much for reading!

I'll see you in the next devlog!