Welcome to the 24th of August! It has been… a while, and that is entirely my bad. I meant to write a devlog last week, but in my defence, I was also in emergency last week, so I think I get a pass.
Basically, I really, really fucked my ankle.
I was walking through what can only be described as overgrown bushlands. The weeds were genuinely about ten feet tall, it was around 11:30pm, and our only source of light was two phone torches. At some point I was climbing up a bank through or around a tree and… I don’t actually know what happened. I don’t know if I fell, stepped wrong, put my foot in a hole, or what. I genuinely don’t remember. One second I was climbing up the bank and the next I was on my hands and knees trying not to throw up from the pain.
We’re now a little over a week post-injury and I still can’t bear weight on that leg at all. I’ve had X-rays and a CT and thankfully they haven’t found any fractures, but there is some pretty severe swelling and the current theory is that I’ve done some significant ligament and/or tendon damage. My foot has also been cycling through basically every colour available to it. We’re currently in the green/yellow era, with bruising extending from my foot and ankle all the way up my calf and shin.
Because apparently one injured leg wasn’t enough, my good knee has also started hurting from having to compensate for the injured one, so I have now graduated to a wheelchair. I’ve been out of the gym for a week, I haven’t been eating particularly well, I’ve been sleeping constantly, and I’ve needed help doing ridiculously basic things around the house. Even just having my foot down for any length of time hurts, so getting around and doing normal things has become a whole ordeal. I can’t even sit at my PC for that long because there’s nowhere to put my foot thats elevated!
Mentally, it’s been pretty rough. I’m okay- I’m not in any kind of dangerous headspace- but I am extremely frustrated and very sad. Losing that much independence basically overnight has been difficult, particularly when I still don’t really know exactly what I’ve damaged or how long this is going to take to recover. Pain medication has also been an adventure. I started with paracetamol and codeine, which did basically fuck all except make me feel sick, and I’ve now been moved onto tapentadol. It definitely doesn’t hit quite like Endone, but it at least makes existing considerably more pleasant.
All of this is basically a very long-winded way of explaining why there was no devlog last week. I was mostly unconscious.
BUT. Before I destroyed my ankle, I actually started making proper sprites for Unchosen! And I am really excited about them.
Starting Small: The Apple Core
Technically, the first thing I made wasn’t an enemy. It was an apple core.
So tiny!
I’d originally decided I was going to work on some of the game’s item sprites, and because we already have the full apple item, an apple core seemed like a good place to start. It shares a lot of properties with the full apple, except obviously it’s already been partially eaten, so it restores less health and will have slightly different flavour text.
The plan is for the apple core to be one of the possible drops from enemies around the Apple Orchard, particularly the rats. Because, well, rat eats apple, you kill rat, rat has apple. Game design. I’m still deciding whether something like the scarecrow should be able to drop one as well, but I definitely want enemies to have a mixture of environmental drops and things specific to the creature itself. So a rat might drop an apple core because it lives in the orchard, but it could also potentially drop things like fur or a rat tail because… it is a rat.
The process I’ve been using for these sprites has actually been pretty consistent. I start by searching for things like rat pixel art, apple core pixel art or scarecrow pixel art, partly because I’ve never drawn most of these things before, but also because I want to understand how other artists have successfully translated those shapes into pixel art. Then I move onto actual reference images and start looking at the real-world shapes and features I need to communicate with a very limited number of pixels.
The Rat
For the rat, I looked at photographs of rats and mice, pixelated versions of those images and other pixel-art rats to figure out which features actually make something immediately read as “rat.” I didn’t want mine to look like the traditional tiny, scampering RPG rat, though. In my head, these are giant rats, and I picture their body language as being closer to a cat or dog. They’re big enough that they have some actual presence and can reasonably be threatening to the player.
Eventually I had the idea of a rat with its back arched in that way cats do when they’re frightened or defensive. Its body all hunched upward and it looked like it was ready to attack, which became the basis of the pose. I experimented with having the tail raised as well because I liked the silhouette, but once I actually put everything together it didn’t make much anatomical sense, so eventually the tail came back down.
One thing I really wanted to avoid was making the rat look inherently evil. It’s not some corrupted demon rat with glowing red eyes and giant spikes coming out of its back. It’s literally just a rat. A really fucking big rat, admittedly, but it’s an animal that happens to live here. It isn’t evil for existing, and I wanted the design to reflect that. I ended up giving it these really big ears which, honestly, make it kind of cute despite the aggressive stance.
Whether or not the idea of normal rat instead of corrupt demon rat stays, I have no clue. This might change! It might not!
Colour-wise, I’ve gone with a dark grey-blue for now. That could absolutely change because we’re still very early in the art process, but I’m trying to think about how every sprite is going to interact with the environment around it. The Apple Orchard is going to lean pretty heavily into reddish tones, so I wanted the rat to contrast enough that you can immediately identify it against the environment without having this ridiculously saturated blue creature standing in the middle of an otherwise earthy area.
Something I’m also having to actively learn with these sprites is when to stop adding shit. I’ve drawn before and I’ve made much more complicated artwork before, so there’s this part of my brain that looks at a relatively simple enemy sprite and goes, That’s it? We’re done? Surely we add more?
But I’m not creating a standalone illustration. I’m creating something that eventually needs to move. If I create an insanely detailed rat, that’s fantastic until I realise I now need to recreate all of that detail across every frame of its movement, attacks and death animation. So the shading on these first designs is intentionally pretty simple. It feels strange to finish something and think that seems too easy, but I’m trying to think about what future me is actually going to be capable of reproducing consistently across an entire sprite sheet. Future Me would probably like Current Me to stop being an asshole. Future me would also like current me to go and lay down and rest to fix this ankle, but im sure future me will understand how shitty and boring that is.
The Wolf That Is Unfortunately Just a Dog
I also started working on the wolf enemy, although I’m not going to show him yet because… he looks like a dog.
Just a nice dog. A lovely guy. Zero murderous intent.
I’ve been looking at wolves from the side, wolves howling, aggressive wolves, their body structure, their faces and how other artists communicate that aggression without making them ridiculously detailed. I just haven’t found the balance yet. I want it to clearly read as a wolf and as something potentially dangerous, but I don’t want to achieve that by covering it in spikes, enormous teeth and fifteen layers of detail that I’ll hate myself for when animation starts.
So the wolf is currently sitting in art jail until I figure out how to make him stop looking like he wants me to throw a tennis ball.
The Scarecrow
The scarecrow, however? I fucking love him. This was probably my favourite thing I worked on.
Unlike the rat, I actually couldn’t find much existing pixel art that matched what I had in my head, so instead I started looking at photographs and artwork of scarecrows. Eventually I found one that immediately clicked. It had this long, almost trench-coat-like silhouette, exposed sticks and twigs, long arms and this bag-like covering over its head. It was creepy without looking ridiculously overdesigned, which was basically exactly what I wanted.
I started by tracing over the general shape of the reference so I could understand the silhouette, then started changing things as I converted that shape into pixel art. Once I had the actual scarecrow figured out, the challenge became making it feel like it actually belonged in the environment rather than looking like somebody had just pasted a scarecrow sprite on top of the level. One of the things I ended up adding was grass around the base, which I really like because it makes it feel like it’s actually standing in the orchard rather than on top of it.
Of course, because game development apparently means every answer creates another question, adding that little bit of grass immediately made me start thinking about the environment itself. What does the grass in this level actually look like? How tall is it? Does it move? How much environmental animation do I want? How does the scarecrow visually connect to the ground around it? Those aren’t necessarily questions I need to answer right now, but making the actual game art instead of just writing about it in the GDD is starting to force some of those decisions, which is honestly really exciting.
Keeping Track of References
One other thing I’ve started doing properly is keeping the reference images I use alongside the designs in my GDD. If I find a photograph, piece of artwork or pixel-art example that significantly influences how I approach something, I’m saving it with the relevant design notes.
Partly, that’s useful for future me when I inevitably look at a sprite six months from now and think, What the fuck was I doing here? But I also want to maintain a record of where ideas came from. If Unchosen eventually releases, I want to be able to look back at the development process and properly acknowledge the artists and references that helped inspire particular designs rather than trying to reconstruct all of that years later.
So… That’s Where We’re At
It isn’t the enormous development update I would normally like after this long between posts, but considering I’ve spent the last week horizontal, drugged, bruised, occasionally hospitalised and generally feeling very sorry for myself… I’ll take it.
More importantly, I’m genuinely excited about finally moving further into the art side of Unchosen. For so long, so much of this project has existed as systems, code, documentation, ideas and placeholders. Now I’m starting to actually draw the things that are going to exist in this world, and there’s something really satisfying about seeing those ideas finally turn into actual game assets.
So far there’s an apple core, a giant rat and a creepy scarecrow. And somewhere, hidden from public view, there is a wolf who looks like an extremely good boy.
We’ll fix him later.
Hopefully next time I write one of these I’ll also be significantly less green.
Until then, thanks for sticking around. 💙
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