Hi raweaf!
We are designing the characters to have 8 directional movement + a whoooole lot of skills and combos, which also has to be animated in 8 directions. If this was a 3D game or perhaps a sidescroller, sure we could add more detail to the characters. but, in our case it would just take such an immense amount of time, time that we don't have.
I know fine well what the different characters look like, I drew them. This boss you're refering to only have this direction to worry about atm, and they will probably be re-designed to fit the re-made graphics, so we can have more interesting abilites and possible more than 2 directions! Also there is a huge different in size between the Brawler and this boss, we can fit in more detail because the details won't be as small, as they would've been in a player sprite. The boss will have two directions, maybe 1 or 2 attacks each. The brawler will have 8 directions, with several attack combos in all directions.
We've thought this in detail while designing the characters, we've tried more detail, but it would just take too much time. Time and money, which are two things you also have to take into consideration while designing graphics for a game. If not, we could make everything hand drawn and all the characters could have a detail at every pixel corner. There's a reason we see all these Lo-fi games out there, they take a week to produce graphics for, easy and really fast to animate. But, we didn't want to be like everybody else.
If you have a look around at other games being produced at this time, I think we're the only ones that come close to having detailed pixel art(Apart from some Sidescrollers, but they just have to do everything in 1 direciont then flip). (I wouldn't count a pixel blob in a 6x6 sprite a detail) I mean stuff you could actually make out as something, not just greeble that could be anything. I'm not saying that these pixels are bad, just that they are way more simple and faster to create. You can't have everything in the world.
For the females in this game. I really don't know how you can make out physique in a sprite at this size, or facial features. If we made one of the girls blonde, people would complain that we don't have enough red-haired females, I think you get my point. In these two portraits I think you can clearly see that they look different. The other reason one of them don't have bright hair, is because it looked absolutely horrid against all the backgrounds, and to be time efficient, we're not redrawing all environments to fit a haircolour. For your comment about skin-colour. When working with pixel art, you traditionally want to keep the colour count low, which is why they have the same skin colour all through out the game, you can see this in pretty much all other pixel art games. I also didn't think it necessary to pick a new colour for the skin since it's only 3 or so pixels in the two player sprites that represent skin.
For your comment about physique. Here are the two sprites. The mage basically has the entire body covered with cloth and armor, the ranger is facing another direction. These are highly trained mercenaries, I don't think it would make sense for one to be extremely fat and the other extremely thin, it would just make the game unserious and we can't see the point in going anymore deeper into the physique of human beings, because it wouldn't gain the gameplay, or the game in general anything in perticular. The females also happened to have these roles in the game that naturally would let them wear less armor to be more agile and fast. The brawler is a melee character that always have to take a beating, so is the Hellion, while the Ranger for example can just stay away and do damage on a distance, as the mage, even though the mage has a bit more amor since she can also use her melee weapon.
I just want to clarify all these things for future, for similar questions or comments about the graphics. We're working really hard to make this game's visuals interesting. There are limits for everything, we're working against time, budget and we don't want this game to take years and years to complete. This game will largely focus on a fantastic gameplay and graphics are always secondary to that. We've are already felt the horrid sensastion of hand drawn pieces(The pod scene took 40 hours) and how long it takes to make a big hand drawn scene in the style we're going for and how long it's taking to animate 4 different characters, with completely different abilities in 8 directions. There are also other things that needs attention when making a game, such as programming, music, sound effects, PR and what not.
So, we're trying to give you our best that we can do with this game and I really hope that you will have a fun time when it's actually in your hands and I have a feeling that these things will be less of a concern when you're blasting through unknown jungles, deep mines, lost civilizations, slaughering hordes of weird creatures and aliens with your friends all over the world using 4 completely different characters!
I hope this was to any help! Thanks for your input!
- Johan
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