Today, I started on a storyline enemy that will appear towards the end of the opening section of the game, a Cadaver.

The Cadaver is basically a re-coloring of The Creep enemy, but at the same time, its not.

As an undead enemy, the cadaver will function completely differently than a Creep normally would. It also meant changing the color scheme the reflect the fact that the creature is dead.

So here is the original Creep…

And here is the new Cadaver…

My goal with the Cadaver’s wounds was to make it look like something had bitten a chunk out of it. I didn’t want the wounds to look like traditional decay, as most dead things do. The cadaver is a zombie from a relatively fresh kill. So blood is a part of the wounds as well.

Since both the Creep and the Cadaver are going to be having storyline appearances and not just be random enemy encounters, I took some time today to also work on their sprite art.

For the record, sprite artwork is HARD. At least to me it is anyway. I’m so used to drawing larger scale pictures for enemy battlers that its tough to try and take those ideas and compress them down to a 48 x 48 space and from multiple angles.

I started by looking at some of the sprite work that already exists out there, finding my way to whtdragon’s work on the RPG Maker web forum. He’s done a lot of great work, so it would be a crime for me not to give a shout for what he’s done.

Specifically, I looked at his smaller animal sprites, finding my way to foxes. The Creep is very similar to a fox, so I felt it looked the closest to what I wanted to do here.

From there, I opened whtdragon’s fox image and a blank canvas side-by-side and tried to re-draw my Creep and Cadaver as a sprite. This was the end result.

Again, big credit to whtdragon, who has done a ton of work with sprites. This was difficult to do and I’m happy the design turned out pretty well.