Shattered Pixel
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Cleric Origins | Patreon Weekly #281
🕑 Added 2024-10-21 15:00:09 +0000 UTCHey Patrons, in this weekly I’m sharing some trivia on the Cleric’s earliest concepting origins.
There’s also a new Shattered Secrets this week! This secrets focuses on some new visuals I’m working on for the title screen!
Also, here are the results for Patreon Poll #58, which asked people to vote on which Patreon rewards they most liked:
78%: Patreon Weeklies
28%: Audio Q&As
33%: Patreon Discord
60%: Loyalty Pins
36%: Patreon Polls (Gold+ Patrons only)
53%: Patreon Alphas (Gold+ Patrons only)
76%: Shattered Secrets (Shattered Patrons only)
This is mostly in keeping with the results of previous surveys, so it is nice to see things stay fairly consistent. As always, the early revealing of content (whether via posts or alphas) is the most popular type of reward. The only notable change is a big swing in how much people like polls, going from one of the more popular rewards to below 40%! I’d be interested in hearing why some of you might be less excited about polls these days, if anyone has any thoughts on that.
And lastly, there’ll be an audio Q&A next week! You can ask questions here or in the Patreon discord.
Cleric Origins
While it may not make much sense, in a way the Cleric was actually the first character ever added to Pixel Dungeon! Way way back around 2015 I found a screenshot from Watabou showing off a hero class that never ended up existing, played in a version of the game before classes were even added (You can see a bunch of other stuff from very early PD here too!):
Nowadays I have a complete archive of old Pixel Dungeon versions, and it turns out this sprite was the hero’s sprite from v0.1.0 until v0.1.2 (Dec 2012), a span of about 6 days, before PD was even on Google Play! After this the hero sprite visually became the Rogue, then classes were later added in v0.3.4 (Apr 2013). You can see their cloth armor spritesheet from v0.1.0 here:
This is completely a guess, but I suspect this sprite was originally going to be the ‘Ranger’, before Watabou decided to scrap that class concept, and later reworked it into the ‘Huntress’ for v0.5.3 (Oct 2013). The original Pixel Dungeon still has some references to the Huntress previously being called ‘Ranger’ in the game’s code.
I really liked the idea of re-introducing this part of the game’s history, and so the cleric’s very early concepts were directly inspired by this sprite, even if the details and motivations for them have changed quite a lot since. In that sense the Cleric is a reincarnation of the very first hero design ever added to the game!
I’ve starting development of this reincarnation in earnest now, and while I’m not quite ready to show off anything yet, expect future weeklies to start showing off quite a bit!
Comments
Fanny Fanny
Wow! Some people really need a better hobby!
Umbra
Unfortunately, I've seen people bitch over a computer virus using They/Them pronouns
José Weliton do Nascimento Santos
Sou brasileiro e uso um tradutor, fica um pouco difícil entender algumas coisas na tradução.
Fanny Fanny
Really? The only possible reason I can think of to get upset about that is from a literal computer programming standpoint, given the code compiles to a collection of 0's and 1's. So, in that sense only is the Cleric binary. If the character represented by the binary code happens to be non-binary, then that could only be upsetting to people with too much interest in other people's business., IMHO.
Umbra
Funny you should mention that, Cleric is Non-Binary, and I've already seen a few people upset about it.
Vorticia
I was having issues voting for multiple selections and i couldn't seem to vote for more than 4 for some reason. So, for me, I love the polls but didn't vote for them because of technical issues! Love hearing more about the backstory and pd history. Looking forward to everything to come!
Fanny Fanny
It is a fascinating dive into the early history of the game. I really enjoyed reading/seeing the sprites! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Shattered Pixel
Yeah that's an unfortunate visual similarity that only cropped up well after this sprite was totally scrapped by Watabou. It's worth noting that this is not the sprite I'll be using for the Cleric in v3.0.0's release, I'm sharing it here more as a piece of history.
Fanny Fanny
Cool! Though with that ginger hair style, he does look a bit like... um, you know. That american politics person some people have various opinions about.
Umbra
I quite like this concept
