Basic animations of the Minotaur Boss (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

I've been working on making all of the necessary basic animations for the upcoming boss; things like idle, walking, attacking, defending, jumping, etc. There's a couple other animations that I need to finish, mostly for his special attacks which I won't spoil just yet. I want to make another interesting and reasonably challenging boss battle so please look forward to fighting against him.

Originally for his weapon I was going to have him wield the classic huge axe, but the patron suggested that I go for a more uncommon approach when it comes to depicting minotaurs and have him wield a sword and shield, which in turn would match well with the theme of his fight arena: the colosseum. I took a look at a few gladiatorial pictures, and added a few scattered pieces of armor as well as a roman inspired kilt complete his visual design, and the front facing horns give him a distinct look.

And as you can see in the previews, he's a huge fellow. As a reference, I've added some other bosses, enemies and Maya herself in the background for comparison, and it's pretty clear that he'll be the biggest character that I've added into the game, completely outmatching his "little" sister who was the tallest until now.

The size difference is even more drastic when you compare his frame to Maya's who's supposed to be an average sized woman, and it goes without saying that she will be the main one "interacting" with the big monster, so that contrast will be interesting. The scenes for the minotaur will be all centered around the vanilla/male and roughplay tags.

That said, it's no coincidence why most pixel art games (adult or not) tend to keep their character designs more on the small side: it's because animating big characters like this is a huge endeavor: for starters it's automatically much more pixels that you have to move around and edit, but also small pixel art has an advantage of allowing artists to "cheat" when depicting motion in animation, because the human brain will fill in the blanks when they see a small pixel characters doing any kind of movement, while that effect is somewhat lost the bigger the character is.

Suffice to say that I may have "bit more than I can chew" with this character design given his stature, so it may take me more time than usual to fully complete his ero scenes, but I think it will be a good challenge for me as an amateur artist so all I can do really is to continue moving forward, one pixel at a time.

Best Regards,

Laek