In my first developer log I'd like to introduce you to the game's name-giving protagonist Tok and his development history.

Background story

First a few words about his background story. Tok is a little goblin who lives peacefully underground with his family, friends and the rest of his people. Everything is great until dramatic events force him to make his way to the strange and dangerous Upperworld and the people who live there. What kind of events these are I don't want to reveal at this point yet. Tok will be one of four playable characters, as Tok will meet new friends during his journey. More about this later, aswell.

Underlying Thoughts

Usually in rogue-likes you play a human hero (or at least someone you would typically call "good") who sets off into a dungeon to defeat something evil and/or save someone or something. I realized pretty quickly that I wanted to deviate from this formula in two aspects:

• the main character shouldn't have "chosen" to be a hero
• the main character should not be a human being

And so Tok was born. I also tried to deviate from the typical rogue-like formula in other areas, but more about that later in another developer log. For Tok, however, it was important to me that he should be likeable. This should be especially evident in his graphic design.

Graphical Design

The graphical development of Tok and the game itself started with me opening a graphics program (I think it was Paint.net) and, with the color palette that was available there, just drawing on it. For the size I chose 15x15 (a decision that seems very strange to me afterwards). You can see the result here:

If you think there's hardly anything to see, then we've probably thought the same thing. To make the graphic more visible, I scaled all pixels by a factor of two:

The graphic (also called sprite) was now 30x30 pixels large and easy to recognize. As I mentioned before, it was important to me that you can like Tok and its appearance should contribute to that. But his current look, with its bright colors and red eyes, made a rather monstrous impression on me. In a first attempt to change that, I adjusted the color palette:

Better! But still not enough. Somehow he has to look a bit cuter. The red eyes and the fangs have to go! And also the head is somehow far too angular.

That's what I wanted! I like that little guy! 

So now I had a design for Tok that I like. And I had also learned that sprites typically come in sizes of 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 and so on. Now you could say that everything would be fine. Well, at first it was. I started designing more characters, experimented with different color palettes and made mookups of the world like these:

But I quickly realized two things:

1. I don't seem to find a colour palette that I like.
2. My artistic abilities are not good enough to draw sprites with many colors.

More by chance than anything else, I stumbled across a four-color Game Boy palette. I had a Game Boy as a child and spent many nice hours playing Game Boy games (Link's Awakening, I'm looking your way). I quickly liked the idea of designing the game in such a four-color palette, so I tried different variations:

If you have looked carefully at the design of the site here, then you may already have a suspicion which palette I have finally taken. And so I redesigned all the characters, including Tok, in the new palette. You can see the final result for Tok here:

This short description here might give the impression that all this happened in one day. In fact, many of the designs and decisions took weeks and the whole design process took at least a month. Not to mention that the design isn't finished yet. 

That's it for now. Many thanks for reading! See you next time.