The Death of a Main Character

by fredelios

This week I have been working on the sprite sheet depicting the death of our main character, having him going through the stages of joining the choir invisible as one mights say.

Starting with him in his regular sneaky pose that everybody in the team have grown to know and love and then having him suddenly jerking up, clutching his chest in confusion and pain before finally falling over and ruining the carpeting of the office or corridor where he has been gunned down in.

 

Like most sprite sheet attempts, the actual work process starts with yours truly acting out the scene in front of the mirror while desperately trying to imagine how it looks from above.

An endeavor that one would advocate doing after one has made sure no one else is inside the house at the time.

Afterwards, it goes to the stick-man phase, with focus on getting the lengths and widths right and getting the poses to look probable, which means a lot of drawing and re-drawing in order to make it seem like it is an actual person that is portrayed and not a robot.

Eventually the frames graduate from being stick-men and leaves their homes to try and find themselves, seeking new opportunities as full-fledged silhouettes.

Once again measurements and straight lines are needed to avoid the lava-lamp look that made itself known in the first version of the primary sprite sheet, but then we are not to acknowledge that irksome version anymore and any surviving copies of it are to be purged at sight.

After much hard work and the occasional mishap the silhouettes are given their rightful colourations as well as getting their hands and a hat taken from the spare-parts-image pasted onto them, so that they can go forth in the world as proper, responsible adults and do their part to make the great machine called society move forward.

It was originally planned to add nifty things like shading and other things to further emphasize the differences between the lower legs and the thighs as well as lower and upper arms, but it was decided that for the alpha and beta such things are not necessary, with the question being put on the shelf until it has been made clear just exactly how many sprite sheets we end up with before doing any further deliberation as to how much care is to be taken on the matter of shading.

 

As to the whyness of the notion, one would have to extensively question the very understanding of the conception of death in video games, which would be a botheration of some magnitude.

One can instead surmise to say that in a game that is meant to profusely pound into the player’s mind the idea that it is bad to be seen, along with the mechanics and dynamics that ensue from said playorial visibility, it is only applicable that the aesthetics follows suit, and as such, when the controlled entity is indeed being seen and is gunned down without mercy the blood is to flow freely, signaling with its characteristic redness and lack of further feasible control of said entity that the course of events that just happened is on the undesirable side of things and is to be avoided in future play-throughs.