#but i know i can do it

This past weekend, a small teaser video I made was uploaded by my good friend @itsactuallyreigh for a Deltarune AU they and I have been working on called DarkLight: Parallel Worlds, and let me tell you, the entire process of batting ideas back and forth so far has been nothing short of a thrill!

We knew early on in that we wanted DarkLight’s protagonists to feature self-inserts of ourselves (You can check out Reigh’s right here!), and I found that to be the perfect opportunity to use my fursona as my respective Deltarune self-insert as well as getting to design a Dark World variation for him, too! And after working meticulously to sprite my fursona in Deltarune’s spriting style…

I can finally show him off!!

I had Micah’s Light World design (Pictured on the left) designed long before I had even played Deltarune (Because… well, he is just my fursona), so having his base design ready when going in to sprite him in Deltarune’s style made the process very easy.

However, what I didn’t have was a clear idea on what I wanted his Dark World design to look like. There isn’t necessarily a consistent theming in terms of the Lightner’s Dark World designs; sure, I supposeKris’ armored statureandRalsei’s wizard-esque outfit kinda leans more toward a fantasy approach… but then we have Berdly, who is clearly just Falco Lombardi.

After some thinking, I had an idea— what if I were to combine design aspects of select video game characters into Micah’s Dark World design? It was an idea that seemed sound enough to work, so I began to look toward some of my favorite video game characters for influences.

Perhaps the most obvious design aspect I I took inspiration from is Micah’s shoulder cape, which some of my followers may recognize as being near-identical to Clairen’s. I can’t help the fact that the panther wife has such a cool cape, and I wanted Dark World Micah to have one, too!

Micah’s Dark World design also features a chestplate and arm gauntlets that are heavily inspired by the armor of Shovel Knight, and while it’s not exactly prevalent in sprite form, I based his boots off of the boots you see in the Mega Man franchise, namely that of Mega Man’s own!

Lastly, you might notice a very specific coloring throughout the design. If you look specifically at the scarf, chestplate and boots… his color scheme draws inspiration from the Bi flag! This was an idea that I had when beginning to outline the sprite, and I’m STILL surprised I managed to get it to look good!

And, as per most of my recent sprite posts, here is the design process I went about when spriting Micah’s Light World variant! You can see a lot of the early steps involve outlining the head, and then once the torso comes in, you can see the exact moment when I shrank everything to be appropriately sized. I was able to get him to be two pixels smaller than Susie’s sprite!

At some point later this month, I’m hoping to draw out his Dark World design so you can get a better idea of what the smaller details look like, but for now, I hope that you’ve enjoyed the spritework and insight on the design process!