[C+C] Janus Clacher, the Grinning Traveler

[MysteryMeat]

Another design for something I'm working on that I want a second opinion on.


This is Janus Clacher!

He's supposed to be a reality hopper, colluding with other incarnations of himself from across various realities to reclaim and research the game's setting, the mysterious Complex. As such, I'm going for a kind of cheerful yet very callous sort, someone who doesn't flinch even at their own potential death because of how in-tune they are with the fractal nature of reality.
A nice dude, but DANGEROUSLY reckless and more than a bit unhinged.

Goals for the design are to indicate his ever-present mania, cheerful nature, and friendly attitude while also hinting at his wild recklessness, scientific inclinations, and unhinged personality.

Basically imagine if Rick Sanchez had his personality completely inverted, but with his core "Everything is meaningless, devote yourself to science" point of view left unchanged.


(Also, the character on the left is there for size reference. Janus is a very abnormally tall, skinny person, so I'm trying to keep him a head above even the taller characters in the game. The woman on the left is supposed to be around 6 feet.)

[MysteryMeat]

Another thing, figured out how his arm's supposed to work. Basically a bundled spool of prehensile cords jutting out of his shoulder.
And without his coat too, so you can see his figure better.

Again, any critique welcome.

[JosephSeraph]

A very cute character / design so far!
My main gripes are on the color field -- too little contrast, you can barely tell the shades, while colors themselves are too far apart and don't really "talk" to eachother. Also, some parts of the sprites are really light, while some others are really dark -- I'd like to see this against a background to see how it'd look.



I did a small palette edit, added a new shade of gray to help his coat stand against dark and light environments, made sure to remove pure white (avoid pure white and black at all costs! unless its a voluntary decision to use them, of course, but it just doesn't harmonize well with most palettes that have subtler colors) hue, saturation-shifted and increased the contrast on the shades of each color, decreasing the contrast of the overall palette to increase readability. Hope it helps! ;u; <3

keep it going!


edit: I fucked up when saving and the palette returned to its previous state :I
this isn't how I did it but its somewhat the direction you should go. ; wwww ; good ruck!

edit2:
tried to redo what i did, welp

[Rosier]

I'm not really sure you need more than one shade per color on the smaller sprite.  It's small enough that having two shades only really complicates things, and you can barely see anything different.

[MysteryMeat]

I see! I tweaked the dark you set slightly to reduce contrast again, though. I'm going for a very soft, downy look with it and the harsher darks in his hair took away from that I think.

I'm not really sure you need more than one shade per color on the smaller sprite.  It's small enough that having two shades only really complicates things, and you can barely see anything different.

Yeah, I get what you mean. That's kind of an artifact of me toying around, though I found the extra shade very useful when it came to animating smaller-him's manic giggle and defining his slender nose better. Without it it just kinda looked wrong. I'll be toying around with that to see if I can't swap it for a more overall-useful shade.