Of course, the sprites I've created for Poppy are way too large to be used for gameplay. I'm planning to implement them as UI elements at the top of the screen.
- The side-view will display the weapon status, which tells the player if Poppy is awake or asleep, and maybe ammo remaining
- The front view will show Poppy's face in a Wolfenstein-style portrait for additional status information, as well as emotions/reactions and possibly dialog
Working in 2D, the challenge with Poppy will be to communicate to the player that the face is actually on the front of the pistol.
This might seem obvious if you're familiar with the cartridge design, but not everyone will see that before they play. Just looking at the image above on its own is confusing.
To address this, I went back to the doodle above where I used an isometric view. By including this additional information in the portrait, it's much easier to see that they are two views of the same object:
