Article Written the : 11/02/2019
Project Made in : November to December 2018
In my opinion, character design is an important part of overall game design. The protagonist's powers should be visible, enemies should look dangerous, their attacks should be obvious (unless of course if you want to create confusion).
Since the game's subject was the jump, me and my partner decided that our protagonist should be a rabbit (they are known to jump a lot, after all). We delve a bit in rabbits and discovered a specie called jackrabbits -big bouncers with very long ears- and we choose it as our protagonist's name : Jack. It's catchy and cool, it's short and it's easy to remember. It also goes back to Jack the Ripper, and after all our character would go through a lot of fighting with his huge sword.
Borrowing from chicken-o-meters and dead space, and using jackrabbits features to our advantage, we had the idea that Jack's remaining life points would be indicated on his sprite. Each time he would take hits, he would lower one of his very long ears. Getting hit with both ears lowered would mean death, of course. Unfortunately, we had to scrap the idea, but if I was to redo that game, I would actually put it in, I think.
So, Jack would be a white rabbit with long ears and big black eyes. As I said earlier, I like it when enemies are obvious. What would be the best opposite to a white rabbit ? Why not black canides ? Let's say black foxes.
I left the more detailed character design of the enemies to my partner, so I can't really extensiveliy talk about it. He did do a good job, and decided to make them all scruffy and pointy, their spikes creating a strong dichotomy with Jack's all-around smoothness.