Goat and Dog Concept Sketches

I'm back with some more concept sketches for you, this time of the Goat and Dog Kapitan.

The goat Kapitan is based on some of the indigenous tribes of the Philippine highlands.  I say "some of" because there are many of these indigenous tribes, and I wanted to represent them overall and not one specific tribe.  These tribes are some of the earliest inhabitants of the Philippine islands.  Similar to their aboriginal cousins in South America, they face many difficulties integrating into modern society, and this goat Kapitan reflects those issues.

The dog Kapitan is quite obviously based on the religious groups in the Philippines.  Religion, for good and ill, continues to play a very strong role in Philippine society.  While there is technically a separation between Church and state, various religious groups hold a lot of sway over their parishioners, and inevitably sway politicians.  In fact, in 2004 and 2010 Bro. Eddie Villanueva ran for the President of the Philippines (finishing a distant fifth).  Religion is at best a sticky topic, and we don't want it to be a distraction from the main game.  To heighten the sense of satire (at this point I'm starting to think we should call the game an allegory) I've decided to create a fictional religion whose symbol is a bone.  Surely that can't be taken too seriously by anyone.

I've also taken the initial Kapitan Sketches and created more polished final art from them.  As you can see from this comparison between the original rushed in-game art and the new Kapitans, there's a bit of differences in terms of look and polish, which means I'll have to revisit these older sprites at some point (really boring but necessary work).  

Lastly, in our dialogue screens with the Kapitans, I'm also hoping to have the Kapitans react emotionally to what you say to them.  Their emotions will be pretty binary, but I wanted an "active" angry versus a "passive angry" and vice versa.  The "active" images will show up when you initially displease a Kapitan, after which they will settle into the "passive" image.

That's it for now.  In the next few weeks I'll be experimenting with animation in spriter to see if there's any point to moving to rigged animation versus straight up hand drawn keyframes.  Stay tuned for more!