Paint Boy Process & "Helper Clip"

I've been talking over the last two weeks about this game project I made some artwork for involving a character that travels through computer programs to fight intrusive enemies.  His name was Paint Boy, and he could swap out the kinds of shots he fired Ikaruga-style, only instead of black-and-red vs white-and-cyan, Paint Boy worked on a red vs green vs blue system.  I not only drew the original concept for Paint Boy, but I also drew some sprites for the project, some of which I showed last week.  How did I make those sprites, though?

Apologies may be in order for this first image, but I needed a rather large canvas for these sprites.  You may have noticed that the sprites from last week were rather rough-looking.  We wanted to make the sprites look like something drawn with crayon or chalk, so I ended up making the sprites huge first and then shrinking them.  You can see the results of the shrunken sprites here.  In addition to the Calculator enemies, I also had some designs for enemies in the Word Processor level.  They included various letters, as well as a semi-colon that I think was supposed to be some kind of bomb.  This sheet also includes a number of other elements from the game, including various bullets and a triangle meant to try and demonstrate the relationship between colors.

But what fun would a space-shooter be without a boss to fight at the end of a level?
 

Here we have the idea for the boss of the Word Processor level: Helper Clip.  Obviously, this is meant to be a parody of Clippit, the somewhat obnoxious assistant character in Microsoft Word.  He is possessed by the force trying to conquer the computer and offers to "help" eliminate Paint Boy.  The idea was to make this go through three phases.  First, he simply winked or blinked to shoot bullets at you.  You shot at both of his eyes until they darkened, at which point, he would start crying semi-colons.  Once both eyes started crying, Helper Clip would block shots with his tail, making the player overcome a secondary-color shield.  With the tail shot off, Helper Clip would become mad, and the final phase would begin.  His weak spot was his mouth, but in addition to the explosive teardrops, the stump of his tail would also spray out bullets.  Once you shot his mouth away, then Helper Clip falls in defeat.

And so ends the saga of Paint Boy.  We had big plans for the project and some ideas for later stages (I think Longcat was supposed to be the final boss), but my group only worked on this for a couple of months before we just stopped.  I would love to be able to work on a project like this in the future, and maybe I will return to it at some point.

If you'd like to work with me on a project like this, or if you need a sprite artist for a project, please let me know.  For now, though, that is pretty much it for Paint Boy.  Next week, something else.