Meet Lani, our Mermaid Archaeologist!

The winners of the mermaid design polls are in! As you know, over on youtube, folks were able to vote for their favorite hair style and tail design. I simply combined them to create our protagonist Lani's look.

First I started by sketching out the intro menu. Definitely wanted to give Lani a cool dynamic pose for this! (you'll notice I used a placeholder logo because I still don't know what to call the game lol)

Next I sketched out her in-game sprite and rendered down the pixel version; she will only have two animations; idle and a swimming(maybe I'll also giver her like a "yeah! I got a treasure!" pose later?)

The sprite on the bottom right is the only one fully colored so far. tomorrow I think I'll take this into aseprite and finish up the animations. (debating whether or not to add the bag?) I wanted to get a little art up top because I am looking down the barrel of a lot of programming and grey boxes (where you just use placeholder art while you build the game), and I wanted at least one pretty thing to look at while that happened!

So who is Lani? As a character, I picture her as a painfully shy, nerdy type who prefers to spend her time in the archives where nobody bothers her. However, the Merthropology Museum she works for keeps sending her out on field missions because they have no budget, so she sort of begrudgingly has to go on these adventures and sometimes has a good time!

That's all for today, folks! Here's your sign-off joke:

Q: Why should you never fight an octopus?

A: They're always armed to the teeth!