Before designing actual characters, we started working on Zabuyaki by relying on this guy:
This is “Template Man”, a temporary character sprite I started working on years ago, and that I picked back up to resurrect our game project. Template Man let us validate the gameplay, and decide which animations we wanted or not. Even though everyone loves Template Man, he won’t be in the final game. Sorry.
Once Template Man was mostly done and implemented, I started working on hero designs.
This is Chai. Since the beginning, he hasn’t changed one bit. Truth is, unlike the 2 others, I designed him over 10 years ago, even before Template Man. He’s a pretty classic design anyway. So he just got a shiny new sprite, which I’m still animating these days.
Here’s Rick. He went through several face lifts and hair styling sessions, and now looks much better than before.
But out of our 3 heroes, Kisa, the main heroine, is the one who has changed the most through time. Kisa started as a very quick sketch. I rarely draw sketches first, but I wanted to show something to Don before starting her sprite (in case you haven’t been following all the previous blog posts, Don is our game coder).
Notice she had Chai’s eyes at first (better known as Brock’s eyes). Back then, we weren’t sure who our 2 other heroes would be, so Chai wasn’t confirmed yet. She had torn pants because our original idea was to have homeless heroes. Or maybe refugees. We still don’t really know, we’ll figure it out later… Hey, it’s a beat ’em up, not a visual novel!
This was Kisa’s first sprite:
While it wasn’t too bad, several things felt off. First, the proportions. We wanted our style to be more SD (Super Deformed, or Chibi) than that. That is to say a bigger head, bigger hands and feet, and smaller body. I also didn’t like her colors. They felt wrong. I tried a few different colors, but couldn’t find anything that just worked.
From here, I remade her sprite to be more SD:
Clearly, I didn’t spend much time on it, and so the sprite quality was actually lower than my previous attempt. But at least her proportions matched what we wanted.
Through several improvements, she gets her scarf back, her old stance, and gets new pink cheeks to make it more obvious she’s a girl.
Then finally, Kisa opened her eyes. That’s because we decided we’d switch her eyes with a side kick character, Chai. This also helps making her more feminine. The pink cheeks were no longer necessary.
Then what? I still didn’t like her colors. And her big kitten eyes made her feel a bit out of place next to the other characters. And I wanted her to look more in front of her, and less at the camera.
A lot more tweaking later…
I decided to remove her scarf, as I couldn’t make it look right, and changed her hat into a head scarf. Then I gave her new puffy pants and made her squat less (which will ease up the walking transition). Then I tried different colors and various things for her forearms.
So this is what she looks like now:
Her earlier green and brown look that you can see above, which wasn’t bad but looked very classic, has become one of her alternate colorsets.
That was a long blog post, so I’ll keep it at that! I hope you guys like the new Kisa.
