A Battle with Pixel Art and the Creatures 1 Grendel

Aside from my time in Creatures and working on plans for the CCSF 2012, my other main project has been fixing the Creatures 1 Grendel. In particular, the final step rests with the female Grendel. Everything is all set… Except for a redesigned head. I have started on a design at least ten times, and each time is just as discouraging as the last! Actually, aside from the pressure of the release that many are waiting on, I have had some good laughs. My trashed designs have included female Grendels who resembled Donald Trump, Bozo the Clown, and a strange creature with a mop on its head. I actually wish I had saved these blunders to share! If ever anyone needed a reason to laugh at me, this would be it! Except I think there are already a bunch of laughable moments.

With the laughter out of the way, I am rather disappointed in myself. Though there are 26 individual images that make up a Creatures 1 head, one could get away with creating seven completed images to create a new hairstyle on an existing head. Yet my lack of pixel art and spriting skills has translated into a whopping zero completed images. Yet despite this apparent failure, I am more determined than ever to complete this project!

The easiest solution is to simply recolor the male Grendel head images, which is all that was required for the rest of the body parts. It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, though… There were over one hundred individual images to go through! My hesitation to do this is because the female would then end up with the same hairstyle. Not exactly what anyone had in mind! Yet this would allow female Grendels to be fixed in the same way as their male counterparts. They would still be distinguishable: Females have a much lighter appearance, after all.

I wanted to see if there were any suggestions or ideas from the Creatures community before moving forward. I intended for the completed Creatures 1 Grendel to be released long ago, with its many fixes that improved postures and gaits. The males have been completed for some time, yet the poor females still suffer from some issues! If having a recolored head for the time being wouldn’t deter players too much, I can have the completed release out within days. I’m open to any thoughts, though! The completed Grendel download can now be found here.

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