One note about the roster looking generic turned into a day of working out what the note meant. The first guess was wrong, and the measurement said it was going well the whole time.
Eight operatives, not one operative in eight colours
The roster was a single build with the palette swapped: same proportions, same silhouette, same head. Eight recolours of the same person, which is exactly how it read. The brief was Street Fighter II. You should be able to tell who is who from the shape alone, with the colour off.
Every operative was rebuilt from their own callsign. Proportions, headgear and the one feature that carries the silhouette all come out of the name, and the in-game sprites changed to match, not just the portraits. A roster screen that promises a character the game then does not hand you is a worse problem than a dull roster screen.
| operative | what makes the silhouette |
|---|---|
| BUZZARDSAW | slim, everything scavenged |
| BULLSEYE | the only one with no visible skin |
| REVAULATOR | the only crest on the head, a horned helm |
| THE ALPHA BETA | widest shoulders of the four mediums |
| GHOST PROTOCOL | slightest frame on the roster |
| THUNDERDOME | twice the torso of anyone else |
| TRIGGER HAPPY | reads as equipment, not armour |
| COYOTE FOXTROT | the only blue on the roster |
Behind each portrait is now a crest drawn from the callsign, the way Street Fighter II puts a flag behind every fighter. It separates the head from the ground, and it is lit differently in every cell, because a crest lit identically everywhere is wallpaper.
Coyote Foxtrot being blue was asked for directly, and it turned out to be the gap in the set: the roster ran orange, crimson, bone, amber, violet, yellow, green, and then a second orange. He is navy over blue-grey with a cyan lamp now, in the colours of an army that is not there any more.
The branch that was wrong
The next note was that the characters needed more definition in pixels. That was read as tonal range, and built: six shade bands out of the four the rasteriser had, so a plate reads as a curved form instead of a flat slab. It measured well. Tones on the enemy sprites went from 34 to 43, up 26%.
It was wrong. "Donkey Kong Country is too smooth" was the reply, and it is right: more tones is smoother, and smoother is the opposite of definition. The work had pushed straight toward the thing being rejected while the numbers said it was succeeding. The reference that landed was Contra III and Super Metroid, with crisper, harder edges.
The six-tone bake is kept on a shelf. It is sound work and may suit the environment art, which nobody was complaining about.
What "more definition" actually meant
The clarifying note was the useful one: you could fit far more pixels of detail inside the boxes of colour. The complaint was never about tones. A flat region of armour has no seam, no fastener, no rib, and at portrait size that empty space is most of the figure.
Portraits are now baked natively at 3x, with the rig redrawn into a buffer three times larger so contours are re-rasterised rather than blown up. At 3x a one-pixel outline is a third as thick relative to the figure, so the rasteriser gained shade-distance, outline and rim parameters to keep the bands from washing out.
Then the detail itself, as two authored passes: a face (brow, eyes with a catchlight, mouth, cheekbone, with sensor arrays and vents for the visored heads) and plate (chest seam, abdomen ribs, belt buckle, panel lines, knee bolt, pauldron rivets).
Both only run in the portrait bake. The constraint was stated plainly: the players looked good in game, so the gameplay sprites were not to be touched. And that is measured. The old rasteriser and rig were loaded beside the new ones and asked to draw every operative in three poses, comparing the material, shade and emissive planes byte for byte.
| comparison | result |
|---|---|
| gameplay bake, old rig vs new, 8 operatives x 3 poses | 0 differing bytes, 8/8 |
| portrait bake at 3x, detail off vs on, mean | 291 bytes changed |
| portrait bake at 3x, range across the roster | 235 (Ghost Protocol) to 348 (Alpha Beta) |
Nothing moved in the game, and roughly three hundred authored marks arrived on each portrait. Ghost Protocol gains least, which is correct: she is hooded, and the face pass has the least to say about her. What the byte comparison cannot say is how the new roster reads at speed on a television.
The ground stopped being a gradient
The figure on a portrait card is hard-edged by construction, with no blending anywhere. The card behind it was not: the key pool and the vignette were canvas radial gradients, a continuous 8-bit ramp across seventy-two pixels. That rendered look is what made the cards read soft however crisp the operative was.
Both are quantised and dithered now, as pixel art has always drawn a gradient: six flat levels with a 4x4 ordered Bayer matrix breaking each boundary into a checker. You keep the falloff and the hard edges, because no pixel takes an intermediate value. One smooth gradient survives on purpose, the key light across the body, at alpha 0.16. It is a light and not a surface, and dithering it would put a checker over the operative's face.
Smaller things
The game stopped naming the attacks. Picking up a fusion printed its name across the bottom of the screen, SUPPRESSION WALL or TESLA COLLAPSE, in the middle of the fight it was interrupting. The banner now says NEW FUSION, and only on acquisition. The name lives on the pickup and in the pause menu, where you can read it.
The front end keeps the title theme. The stage track used to start on the roster, so a level's score played over two screens that are not that level, and the title theme was cut about four seconds in, every single run. The roster and the map are the title's rooms now, and the stage track starts where the stage does.