Hello! Matt Kap here again, with another dev blog about Castle In The Darkness! Today I'll talk a little bit about the hero of the game.

About The Hero
At the beginning of Castle In The Darkness, not much is known about the player character, other than the fact that he is a royal guard of Alexandria, and the sole survivor of the monster attack that left the castle royalty-free. To put it simply, the hero is you, discovering the world and its secrets, as you do. I purposely avoided giving the hero much back story, because the game isn't about his development, it's about a kingdom in danger, and you, the player, cleaning up the mess.
The hero doesn't talk in-game, for the following reasons:
1. Many classic-era console heroes did not talk, so I wanted to stay faithful to that.
2. This game doesn't have a lot of dialog anyway, so excessive dialog would take the focus off of the action!

Design
The hero is primarily shown wearing variants of guard armor from the kingdom of Alexandria. The sketch below shows what he might have worn if he was ever seen without his armor.

(At one point, a tutorial chapter was considered where you run around a field with a wooden sword and regular clothes, but there wasn't much to teach that wasn't easily learnable just by playing the game.)

I designed the armor with one main thing in mind, I wanted him to look like what he is- a generic guard. After sketching lots of types of helmets and armor, I decided that he would have more charm with a helmet that shows his face. I also had to choose something that would look iconic and recognizable in a 16x16 sprite.

At the time when I started to work on this game there weren't any active blue heroes in games (Megaman was on vacation), so I chose blue as the color of the hero's armor. It also happened that blue looked best and stuck out over the background tiles I was drawing, so the choice stuck...

That's it for this post! Please keep checking this blog for future updates! Till next time!