Six Arms Six Shots

We put together a game!
In classic Rogapol fashion, we put cowboy hats on things. This time it's on an alien made of tentacles.

Let's talk about some of my animations and struggles.

Originally I wasn't quite sure what to make the character. We had ideas of just a basic cowboy, some sketches made him old with a beard, one drawing made him a robot. Nothing really felt right, but we did some sketches with tentacles. Like an octopus tentacle.

The blue + brown/tan was a nice combination, but there wasn't anything futuristic or alien. We needed a fun/weird element.

Something between these two points is what we wanted. I like the poncho hiding a lot of its features, and it gave me the chance to figure it out later!

The idle animation is just 4 frames of wiggling pixels. To prevent it from looking too wild I tried to change the silhouette as little as possible. I should have set this to 6 frames and made the changes a bit more subtle. 

The melee animation! This was made with 6 frames, but I drew about 16 and rearranged and cut a lot of them before refining to what I have now. This piece does need the additional swipe/impact animation, but I think the wind-up into strike does well enough on its own to sell that idea.

The run animation is another 6 frames, 3 for the left foot lead and 3 for the right foot lead. Compared to the other animations this has the biggest changes in silhouette and rightfully so has the most movement. They're moving. 

Some of the style (especially our solution to aiming the gun) wall pull from Nuclear Throne and a lot of what  I remember NES games look like. Please don't make me go back and confirm I am wrong.
I liked this little guy enough to decide the game needs a post-jam update. Including all the things I drew but never animated. All the ideas we said at the beginning but forgot. The things we had to cut because it was the last 4 hours. And the tilesets I started but never finished.

If you have questions about the art, my process, or the game please reach out.