Today was two fold: 1) make cat grabbable and talk-to-able and 2) redraw the cat sprite for the third time in as many days--
Oh, right. the Catboys! I didn't talk about the CATBOYS.
Slightly prior to the jam, I did what I do best: throw things at a page and try to make some nice designs. I decided from the get-go that they would all have silly names and settled on [word][word] as a format. I also have a personal bugbear with a lack of skin-colour diversity in anime media, so it was important to me that they all had different shades even if it was subtle. I have this fab skin tone palette (here) that I use with every piece of art to help get a good, lively skin colour and generally the build out the rest of the palette from there. You can see where two of them swapped skin-colour to better compliment the kind of colours I wanted them to have. I think they both look more alive now! Another rule I had was that they all had to be doing something with their hands to help root a personality. I thought about giving Lemon a snack to hold, but I didn't want snacks to be their personality.
I also built out the body shapes and clothes better: Candy has muscles, Lemon is rounder and has a new jumper (courtesy of a friend), Puppie got completely redesigned and Snowprint has a new pair of shirts. Oh, also Bookworm spawned in (courtesy of the same friend! Thank you Mimi <3). I've also-also tried to make them look less baby, but still cute.
Bear in mind - NO writing has occurred yet. This is all vibes. I play a lot of TTRPGs (mostly Pathfinder 2e these days) and this is generally how my character writing goes; vibes first, character later. It's been a long time since I’ve done cell shading and anime eyes like this, so it was a learning process to get it looking right. Trying reaaaally hard to avoid same-face.
So anyway: Cat sprites!
It's cuter to represent the catboys in the overworld as cats, and a bit easier than making people work in a small UI. These are all for Longnight (though, only using the default palette in Asesprite. I'll probably try again eventually - I LOVE the original sprite I did best, I think.
In the background some interesting bugs were created and squashed:
- Cat falls faster when dropped if held for a long time.
- Cat vibrates when picked up
- Cat rockets of screen when picked up
- Cat infinitely spawns new dialogue boxes when clicked. Meow. Meow. Meow.
