The Loneliness of the Long Distance Running Guard

by fredelios

This time around, I present you with the grand première of nameless guard #2, although I guess he would be more of an agent than a regular guard.

At any rate he’s got a fancy fedora and a differently coloured jacked showing a minor attempt at highlights, ‘course those highlights proved to be way too subtle for this resolution, but still being rather inexperienced with sprite sheets I didn’t really want to risk going too strong and having to spend hours fine-tuning them so that they won’t clash to much with their neighbouring frames.

The process has been a rather simple one, with mainly selecting and re-colouring the jacket on all sheets and copy-pasting the fedora over the guard caps, although some re-drawing proved necessary, not to mention having to do some final fine-tuning on both guard#1 and guard#2’s running animation, since their arm motions were a bit wonky and they somehow had ended up looking like they were limping.

Now I don’t want to be accused of being able-ist or something, but I would rather prefer to have these particular security guards and agents being able run without limping. Granted a wheel-chaired guard could be relatively easy to depict, with his flash light directly mounted on the frame, leaving at least one hand free for such things as acceleration so that he’d still be able to pursue our main character, guns blazing.

Although the knocked-out animation would be bothersome, especially if it meant that the wheelchair tipped over, which would make the following “no longer unconscious” animation even harder to make, I mean, how strong would his arms have to be to un-tip himself?

Then again, while Joe Swanson is a cartoon character I’m sure there are plenty of wheelchair-bound people with damn strong arms.

‘Sides this is the FBI we are talking about, (or are we?), I’m sure the handicapped people they hire for night-time guarding are mighty enough for such things.

In fact, I’ll ask my producer right now!

But anyway that is now a future story to tell.

Now where was I?

Ah yes, the re-skinned version of guard#1.

The reason for our beloved guard#2’s existence is simple, variation is the spice of life.

Now some may say that spice is the spice of life, but they’re drunk and we shouldn’t listen to them.

Variation is key, I tell you, instead of facing hordes of light-blue-jacketed guards with flash lights we now have a god 50/50 mix of light-blue-jacketed guards and dark-blue-jacketed guards with different hats.

The third hatted version will be finished sometime later this week, and as such he’s not even worth mentioning here.

He could of course get the chance of gaining his 15 minutes of fame next week, but the look my producer gave me regarding the guard in the wheelchair tells me I’ll have something more interesting to write about by then.