character design for "Polarity"

the character design for "Polarity" has gone through a number of iterations. in my first conceptualisation of the game i envisioned the player character as a humanoid of some sort, in keeping with the sort of character found in most standard platforming fares. i designed "squarebot" in this form, keeping to a low pixel count as homage to the 8-bit era of graphics. i did foresee some issues with this character design: 1. given that the game shall play out in open space, zero gravity areas where the character's orientation is continually changing, drawing of the on screen sprite would have necessitated pre-rendered imagery for every used angle of orientation. this was going to be an issue with any character design, one we've resolved to an extent by clarifying the game design to allow for only 8 direction orientation, ie: the compass directions N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW.

other group members also took issue with the humanoid design voting for a more foreign, geometric design, as a means to distinguish the character form those that have gone before it. from this point i have been designing both octagonal and square characters, which has again further played into the core gameplay concerns. the physics engine is handles the different shapes quite different in collision interactions, an aspect that's core to game design. at present we have not yet ruled out one character or the other, instead considering ideas that would involve both in the game design. for example: a character selection option. our current idea is to have an octagonal robot that begins the game within a square box housing, disguising the avatar's real appearance from the player until the box housing is broken away to reveal it as an octagonal robot, simultaneously altering the physics of the game to either a more difficult or less difficult state, or rather just something different to what had come before.

presently the character design is an ongoing process, one that is closely tied to the core gameplay design choices as well as the overall graphic aesthetic of the game.