Costume Party

August 10, 2018

One of the benefits of having created five Sleuthhounds games, prior to the in development Sleuthhounds: Cruise, is that I get to reuse a whole whack of character animations from those earlier works. Even just having simple things done like walking and talking for Ampson and Homes saves me a good deal of production time now. That said, I do quite enjoy it when adventure games that I play provide a change of clothes for the player character.

One of my top ten favourite games of all time is Sierra’s Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood. It feels like a grand epic of a game even though it’s not really any longer and is, in some ways, an easier game than a lot of Sierra’s other, better known classics. One of the things that helps to give it that sense of scale are the disguises that Robin can use throughout the game.

The many disguises of Robin Hood.

In Conquests of the Longbow, Robin has no less than six different costumes, including his standard suit of Lincoln green. Each costume is associated with its own little adventure within the overall game. Giving a character multiple costumes within a game helps to make the world as a whole seem larger and consequently more immersive. As with any form of fictional storytelling, when plotting out and designing a game it’s always important to strive towards the willing suspension of disbelief of the audience. The more invested you can get a player the better, and the changes of costume are a good way of doing that.

Over the previous Sleuthhounds games I’ve changed up the look of Homes and Ampson several times. In some cases I’ve taken their existing sprites and simply changed the colours of their clothes. While not as dramatic a change in look as completely redrawing them it still helps to change the look and tone of the games. The benefit of recolouring is that it’s something that can be done programmatically, meaning I can bulk change the colours of the sprites in a matter of seconds rather than spending hours drawing net new animations. From a production standpoint, it’s a useful, time saving technique to use.

Given the relative shortness of the previous Sleuthhounds games, the characters typically only have one set of clothes per game, with the notable exception of The Halloween Deception where Homes gets to disguise himself as a fortuneteller. With Cruise being a longer game, there’s more opportunity in the storytelling to change up the look of the characters.

A couple of different looks for Homes and Ampson in Sleuthhounds: Cruise.

While I am using the recolouring technique, as can be seen between Homes’s typical beige suit and his “fancier” grey suit, I’m also incorporating a couple of changes where I am drawing new sets of animations for both Homes and Ampson. These particular alterations to their look are being done in very controlled situations in the game. The idea is to occasionally change up the looks of the characters without having to recreate every single animation for them in the game, which would be a lot of work.

Although I’ve currently only got a couple of different clothing changes for both main characters at this point, I am planning to include one or two others per character before all is said and done. Changing their looks up should make the game feel more expansive, help to keep the visuals fresh as the game proceeds, and hopefully will be a nice little bit of extra polish to treat players too. Keep checking for more costume changes here on the blog in the future as development proceeds.

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