In this post I want to talk about some of my thought processes and inspirations for Valerie's sprite design. She's the player character of a 2D platformer game, so there were several things I needed to consider before committing to it. I'm no professional, so take any of this advice with a teaspoon of salt! Let's get into it.

Colours

This is her bouncy little idle animation in the game.

One of the first things you might notice is the limited palette. Each colour only has two tones - light and shade, which limits the level of detail and gives a slightly cartoony look. It does however give the very valuable bonus of efficiency!

I want to be efficient, but one shade per colour is a bit much...

I'm only one person, and I knew from the start that the main character would have lots of animations (she has 687 frames at the moment). Making these animations is one of my favourite bits, but the more colours you use, the more time-consuming it will be to make each sprite which multiplies the total hours taken. Two shades per colour is a nice sweetspot because it lets you provide enough form and detail at this resolution. It also helps with...

Contrast

On this light sky background, her dark hair is what stands out.

But on this dark earthy background, her dress and skin tone is what stands out.

Features

I remember while I was shuffling between several very different designs before having settled, I read an interview where Shigeru Miyamoto talked about why Mario is the way he is:

[1] "...it was a very small character on the screen. And so in order to emphasize the unique characteristics of the character, we made the big nose and the mustache and the overalls to make it easy to understand what the character was doing..."

Similarly Valerie's hair, dress, belt and collar were made this way for two main reasons:

• To give well-defined shapes in a low resolution.
  
• To flow nicely when animated.
  

In the picture above, you can see that her hair is split into 3 different parts. This means that when I'm animating it I can focus on making each individual bit flow nicely, which goes a long way in making the movement feel more interactive and fun. Because it's a platformer game, that can't be emphasised enough!

In this run cycle you can see the 3 parts of hair move separately.

The other flowing animated part is of course the skirt, which I tried to make look like it's realistically being pushed up by the knees, then falling back down again. These kinds of details really help sell the movements as carrying more weight in the player's eyes. Funnily enough, this logic is kind of the inverse of Miyamoto's because of technical limitations at the time:

[1] "He wears a hat because as I mentioned we had very few dots available to us to draw the character, and trying to draw hair that moves while you run would've been very complicated."

As for the red belt, I wanted something that separated out her bottom half and her torso to make her movements more readable. I also wanted to show a tinge of the brave adventure protagonist that she is. Heroes love to wear red, after all. Is Valerie a hero? You'll have to decide for yourself.

The goal was always to make moving around feel fun for the player.

Scaling up

 

Thanks for taking your time to read! If this post was interesting to you, please check out the free demo of Valerie, the game I'm working on right now.

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Sources:

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/06/19/415568892/q-a-shigeru-miyamoto-on-the-origins-of-nintendos-famous-characters