Hello everyone, and welcome back to Troop Spotlight, the blog series where each week, we discuss one of the Troops from OgreWare’s Calling All Heroes. This week’s contestant is the Bat.
Fierce, fluffy, and famously the only truly flying mammal, bats are found on every continent on the planet, but I’ve only encountered them in my home in North America (once literally, with one in my kitchen!), and on a college study-service term working at schools in Jamaica. In Jamaica, interestingly enough, “bat” refers to pretty much anything, other than a bird, that flies – so we were very relieved to find out that “the attic is full of bats” meant “there are moths [or some other type of winged insect] in the attic.”’
In designing the Bat troop for Calling All Heroes, years later, I was reminded of the popular practice of “duppy stories” and the “Duppy Bat.” Duppy is a Jamaican patois term that can be roughly translated as “ghost” or “malevolent spirit.” We used to sit around at night – no campfire, usually, but we also had no TV so we’d end up just sitting around – and the local kids would tell us duppy stories. Some of them were, to be honest, actually way too scary for me. Deformed creatures like rolling calves and Duppy Bats just creeped me out.
So when I’d gotten this far into designing the Troops, I decided to make this Bat troop a little more creepy than the previous ones – more a of a Duppy Bat and less of a cute Imp or Slime. To do this, I made him a bit skinnier than how we usually imagine bats, enlarged his eyes, and added more detail lines than I normally would. Detail lines actually tend to make characters look older or more creepy (depending on the line placement and weight), and I think in this case it worked very well.
The Bat here is presented with his cousin, the Golden Bat. When OgreWare showed me an early version of this Bat, I said “Oh, he’s been hit by Zombie Midas and the Golden Plague!” Somehow, the creepiness made the gold look more sickly yellow than shiny. But regardless, I look forward to unlocking both versions in Calling All Heroes, which you can now play online here.
That’s all we’ve got for this week, but check back on Thursday for a progress update. I can’t wait to be updating you on the next few Troops. Things are about to get interesting…
~Admin Julian