(image is pixel-doubled, it's really half this size) When I first decided I wanted to create a suit of battle armor for Sol Hunt to fly around in (inspiration: Bangai-O... try it, it's fun! Oh that's right, the Dreamcast is DEAD), I had a specific image in my head. It was going to have a big orange cockpit in the middle, all surrounded by the usual metally bits that mechs are made of. But getting that image down on pixels turned out very tricky! This sheet is an unedited copy of how I got there.
The stuff in the lower right were my first attempts... just sort of fiddling around in a 16x16 space trying to put together a basic shape (which works great on living creatures, I don't know why this was so tough!). That didn't go well. Another attempt, and a random grey blob that might be a duck, is to the left of the large middle robot.
Then I tried creating it as vector art. The big one in the middle is a greatly shrunken down version of that. Again, I was just doing basic shapes, not a detailed final. I liked what I had in general, so I shrunk it
way down, which is what you see on the left (top one). Then I pixeled over the shrunken one to make it as defined as it needs to be when it's so small (that's the lower left).
This pleased me! It's not 'cool', it's a wacky eggbot, which is exactly what I want (and not easy to do in such a small space!). So the upper row is it being colored into the final Sol Hunt colors (she always uses yellow and orange, that's her thing). I wasn't sure about the arms being orange, so I tried the white arms on the left too. Orange is better. The third of those is subtly different - it's her standing on the ground. I don't know if I'll even use that. It's a 'fly around with a jetpack' game, so you don't ever need to land, it'd just be a pointless visual effect for when you happen to have ground directly under you.
In-game, the left arm is a separate object which rotates to face the mouse cursor rather than having discrete angles. She fires with the left arm, the right arm is just there because you can't make a one-armed robot. Maybe it can be involved somehow in the 'using a superbomb' animation. If I make an animation for that. The fun thing I just implemented is that her gun arm is different depending on which weapon is equipped. There are many weapons. Well, there's one. But there will be many.
