The game · Dev note · 2 min read
Decide what it does before what it looks like
Eight character designs were rejected in a row. Each one started from a look. The fix was one sentence.
Eight rejections
Early on we designed characters the obvious way: think of something that would look good in this world, then work out what it does. Eight designs in a row were thrown out. Looking back, every rejection came from a guess about how a thing should look, and none of the eight had a line saying what it does.
What we found
We went through the asset packs published by the pixel artist Penusbmic and read every note where he says what a character was designed for. There are 23. Every one names a behaviour in a fight: a range, a tempo, a trick or a kind of damage. "Deal quick burst damage." "Hide and surprise players." "Deal AOE damage." Not one describes a look, a colour or a theme. The single exception is a joke about a toaster.
The animations follow the sentence too. He drops a standard animation when the behaviour makes it pointless: one character has no idle, because it spends its time hiding in the mud.
The rule
Before anything is drawn, every shell gets one sentence: "This shell was designed to ___." The blank is filled with a range, a tempo, a trick or a kind of damage, and never with a look. The outline, the list of animations and the colours all follow from that sentence.
Why it works
A sentence about behaviour can be proven wrong by playing the game. A look cannot.