WH #5 - It's Not A Bug, It's A Feature

Continuing on the subject of things I really dislike when creating pixel art, we come to the things creeping and crawling around in Westen House, presenting the action-oriented aspect of the game's challenge:

In theory, a group of two-frame animations is nothing special and, in fact, for three out of these four creatures, it's no problem at all. The rats work well enough, the bats look pretty cute, and the blobs are kinda funny. The spiders - at least, I'm assuming that's what they're supposed to be - are pretty confusing, though. The bobbing cephalothorax on a static abdomen and legs that basically just go up and down get rather lost, because they're monochrome and only a single pixel wide, with weird angles in their joints. I realise it's very difficult to animate something that size - particularly something as complex as a spider - but it's hard to recolour something if you don't understand what you're looking at.

Which brings us to my first drafts of the sprites for the SAM:

The rat and bat are a little basic, but I'm quite pleased with the blobs, if only because I squeezed two different colours out of the palette... and could probably manage at least one more (blue) if I was that way inclined. The spider, however... doesn't look any more like a spider than the original, nor does it look any less confusing with the body in one colour and the legs in another. In fact, looking at it now, I realise I've messed up the 'back' leg on the 'moving up/left' version of the sprite... though, honestly, I don't think fixing that error would be enough of an improvement.

Now, just to add to the fun here, if there's one thing I hate animating, it's arthropods of all stripes. The more legs they have, the more I dislike even the idea of rendering them in pixel art. When I ended up creating the 'Undermined Nostalgia' cavern for The Lower Caverns, I quickly came to regret creating an arachnid/Horace amalgam and have never been entirely happy with it. Since this game has the added complication of requiring its sprites to be designed for an isometric environment, I needed to have a good, long think about how to approach a wholly new Spider sprite.

Straight off the bat, I knew there'd be no way for me to convincingly represent eight legs within a 16 x 16 pixel sprite (and here, it helped that the MSX sprite appears to have only four). Even then, animating isometric sprites is something I don't have any real experience in, outside of this adaptation. Thus, I figured the best thing to do was take a technical, structured approach.

 

Starting with an approximate circle, laid out on the 'ground' of an isometric environment, I simply drew a pair of legs on each side, each in two positions: together and apart. This took a bit of tweaking, but making use of Aseprite's layers made it a lot easier. The circle was the background layer, then the 'left' and 'right' pairs of legs were on layers of their own. Once I was happy with their movement, I designed the new spider body on the layer between the two sets of legs, with a view to making it perhaps a little more intimidating:

Since I liked the head-bobbing effect of the original, I figured it'd be worth keeping it for the new sprite. Additionally, since the sprite was being developed on layers, I realised it'd be simplest to use the same leg animations, regardless of which direction the spider was moving in. All I needed to do was create views of the body walking up/left and down/right (assuming, for the moment, that something in the code flips the sprite for moving in other two diagonals). All that remained then was to shade the legs and apply the masking outline:

Now, the obvious flaw in this design, now that I see it in action, is that it takes up the full 16 pixel width, meaning the masking outline gets cut off when the legs are extended. I'll need to see the sprite in action, within the game, to determine how much of a problem that actually is, and whether it warrants either another redesign or just some tweaking. At this stage, everything is far from final, and the programmer is working with the earlier drafts of the sprites anyway. I'm already not happy with some of the shading... but there's plenty of time to make adjustments.