After starting Ludum Dare eight hours late, I worked on one character sprite. All of this time, I was working on just one sprite. Warning: Terribad graphics ahead!

All I stood firm on was the fact that the game would be a top-down game. So I created an 8-way character with three walking frames in each direction. First, I drew a rough animation on my DSi using Flipnote Studio (free and really awesome!). It took about an hour, and the results were:

The rough animation from Flipnote Studio on the DSi.

After that, I went to my 3DS and fired up Colors! 3D. Using Colors! 3D, I took a photograph of each frame from the DSi Flipnote Studio, and I used that photo as a background for drawing each sprite. I colored it in with the worst colors imaginable. The resulting sprite sheet has been scaled to 1024×1024 and looks like:

The resulting sprite sheet. I did not see it animated yet. For this blog post, I scaled it down to 384×384.

I did not think at all about what the character was going to be like, but I started drawing with these desires in mind:

1) I wanted a chibi character because it would fit the perspective well. I was not intending for it to be a child, but it kind of came with the chibi. That failed because when I scaled the image to fit into a POT box, stretching the character to 128×256, the proportions became more normal…

2) For some reason, I wanted twin pigtails similar to Meredy from Tales of Eternia. That made the character look distinctive… and also a girl.

3) I wanted to make the character have purple/red skin so she’s not similar to any nationality. (I didn’t want her to be white because pretty much every game character is white, and I didn’t want her to be black because I’m black and didn’t want to create someone in my image at this time.) But that too failed, and she’s dark skinned anyway. Oddly, that adds another similarity to Meredy…

Ugh… So much time spent on drawing the character, which sucks anyway, and now I’m spending time writing about her. I must move on to coding now!