Some thoughts about character designs

Just something I was thinking about earlier.

I was browsing sprites, nothing specific, I just like pixels. While browsing I saw sprites for Doom64, and I was honestly a lil surprised because I always thought all versions of doom always used the same sprites. Doom64 does not.



Everything looks redrawn on Doom64, but the designs look the same, with 2 notable exceptions: the pain elemental and the cacodemon.

normal cacodemon - cacodemon doom64 - normal pain elemental

Even though the designs are different, it also vaguely looks like they were switched with each other. It's almost like whoever was in charge of setting the sprites to the enemies ingame didn't know which went on which and messed up. Even the Doom Wiki mentions that the designs look suspiciously like the other creature's previous version.

It's also interesting to know that the design for the original cacodemon was simply ripped off a D&D book. It always feels weird when you find out that big companies just blatantly rip off something and no one cares it was from something else. If you ever made a character, you've probably tried to make it look as different as possible from anything else. You don't wanna to be the guy copying someone else.



But then you hear stories about how Adell from Disgaea 2 is based on Adelheid from KoF, or how K9999 from KoF is a very obvious ripoff of Tetsuo from Akira, and you wonder "Is it really worth being original?".

Maybe, maybe not.

I've personally always had a concern with trying to be original with character designs, but truth is, whatever you come up with it's likely someone already did it first.

That's actually the main reason why I'm so jealous of Jimmy's persona: I've never seen anything like it. No one else has a bard mainly made of tentacles and of ambiguous anatomy.

Curse his sexyness too.