And thus Sir Blastalot was born

PlataGO! is a level editor that allows its users  to dive straight into creating 2D platformers levels using the built-in resources. With this project, I aim to create a brand new pack of free resources that could be used with PlataGO!'s constraints.

At the beginning, I didn't intended to make a medieval fantasy type of game. I had released the jam version of Grimoirea few weeks prior to that and I wanted some change in the scenery. I wanted to make something in a more modern setting, yet still adventurous. PlataGO! features a really decent weapon system with 9 weapons and I choose a sprite sheet from Chaser's Gaming, a fellow artists and regular contributor to OpenGameArt.org.

The sprite sheet features some kind of secret agent with all the moves I could dream for, even a climb animation, which is rather rare on OGA's spritesheets.
However, my joy was short as I soon discovered another PlataGO!'s constraints: to my knowledge, it's not possible to adjust the spawn position of the bullets.

Why is it problematic? Because PlataGO! default characters are a bit SD (Super Deformed) ie they look more like Mario than Lara Croft in terms of proportions. So the bullet would spawn at a logic place for that type of character, but when using a sprite with more realistic proportions, the bullet would spawn right at the crotch area. Especially the laser weapon for which you can judge by yourselves:

Which is fun, don't get me wrong, but yeah that wasn't the direction I wanted to go with this project. So I tried to live with it for a few hours but then I got very frustrated with the non possibility to obtain the result I desired.
Luckily, the hours spent browsing and collecting art on OGA were not for nothing as I remembered that cool knight character that I, in the back of my mind, knew his existence, but never had the chance to use in some project.

Too bad mister Agent, it was sweet but short, and I promise I'll keep you in mind for some future project where it will be yourtime to shine and show the world your extensive list of cool platforming moves.

Moreover, Sir Blastalot spritesheet features 8 direction shoot animations, and it was just perfect as while dabbling with the Agent, I noticed that PlataGO! proposes an 8 direction shooting system!

HOWEVER, as I dive into the spritesheet, I realized that PlataGO! does not support 8 direction shooting animations... Indeed, in this tool, shooting just spawns a bullet and that's it, there is no shooting animation.

On top of that, another disappointement was the fact that this cool sprite was actually too big to fit into the 64 x 64 pixels frame because of the wings on the helmet:

The disappointment was mitigated because dear Emcee Flesher, another fellow OGA artist and contributor, seems to have forethought that issue and published a version of Blastalot without the wings, and at that moment my friends, that had the taste of perfection.

True perfection does not exist though, as the climbing animation is missing, and I'll have to draw it myself but I'll keep that for later and for now, I'll go with my placeholders for the climbing.

After some time and thanks to my newly found knowledge of how PlataGO!'s character spritesheet works, I was able to align the sprites correctly and to enjoy the birth of Sir Blastalot.
For the colors though, I chose to not change anyhting to the original sprites. A lot of dithering has been done here and I tried to color swap with theDB32 palette, but at some point it was a bit too much of a hassle and I would have to manually redraw over all the sprites.

For some reason, some pixels that I would expect to be black have a dark red color. I have no idea if this was intended or if this is an artefact, but I took the liberty to paint it black.

Previously, we learned that the main character has up to 4 different idles. Maybe one day I'll find the courage to create new animations, but for now, I'll go with a static idle. I copied and pasted the static idle frame into all the other idles so our Sir Blastalot would not randomly disappear dut to a missing frame.

Same for the jump and fall animations, I went with the basic 1 sprite while jumping and 1 sprite while falling.

I also took the original crouch animation to use as the "land" animation. Which is, by the way almost never visible as it only play when the character lands after a fall but stays idle. It will be skipped if the character moves as soon as he lands, which is the case maybe 90% of the time, I guess?

The death animation is only 5 frames, so I had to shorten this beautiful animation called Soulsplode by IndigoFenix. It hurts a little to see the animation cut short, but eh, I love this one so much that I just could not not use it.

I don't intent to use Teleport and Jetpack, but that may change. For now I'll keep the placeholders here too.

And finally Sir Blastalot can move around!





Feeling generous? Offer me a coffee so I can continue working all night long! ♥