Doctor Seymour Colourization

May 24, 2019

Recently in Sleuthhounds: Cruise I’ve been incorporating a couple of scenarios that involve extra characters. Aside from the two lead characters of Jane Ampson and Pureluck Homes and the rest of the main cast it was always my intention that the game be populated with various background characters. These characters would be unrelated to the main plot but would help to fill out the game world and would occasionally be useful in several puzzle sequences. Beyond having that basic idea, I didn’t give the extras that much thought. Not until I started adding them in.

To keep work on the scripting side of the game going, I didn’t want to take time to create brand new sprites and walk cycles for the extras I needed for the puzzles I was working on. In these particular cases the extras were members of the wait staff of the ship. It made sense to reuse the sprites of Carlotta Travail (the maid) and Emmanuel Laybour (the steward).

Once I put the extras in, using the sprites of the main characters, a problem became apparent to me, which had been vaguely scratching at the back of my mind for some time. Namely, how would players be able to differentiate the main cast characters from background extras?

[The cast of the next Sleuthhounds game.]
The cast of Sleuthhounds: Cruise.
Click to view larger.

Most of the main cast characters are pretty vibrantly hued. It occurred to me that I could make extras less vibrant, muting their colours and shifting them more towards greys and very light pastels. The differences in colour and intensity should make extras more readily distinguishable from the main characters. However, in reviewing the main characters there was one in particular that I was worried about: Doctor Seymour.

[The cast of the next Sleuthhounds game.]
The old Doctor Seymour (left) and the new one (right).

Doctor Seymour’s original sprite wore grey clothes and even her body colours were rather muted. This made her fairly close to what I was envisioning extras would look like. After a bit of playing around with colour’s I settled on a green/blue shade for her clothes and made the rest of her more vibrant. The effect is that she is much more colourful, like the rest of the principle cast, while also being quite different colour wise from them, which was also important to me as I’ve discussed in the past.

I still have to create the actual extra character sprites and play around with their colouring. Such experiments may show that one or two of the other main characters will also need to be adjusted. However, I quite like the new version of Doctor Seymour and feel confident that I can balance the extras properly so that they’re still the same art style but that they’re also easily distinguishable so that players don’t have to worry about them as suspects in the case.