Pixel art trickery

I did one more palette swap for a brown-eyed version of Finn, which I think will be the final:



I've also been scouring the internet for free photos and sprites for new characters, props, etc. for episode 2. I wrote that the roboticist George Flynn drinks "Mad Scientist Cola", and my first instinct was to photoshop over a photo of a soda can for that. But I'm not very good in Photoshop, so I decided it would probably look better if I started with a pixel art base. I found this set of sprites on OpenGameArt.org, which contains a soda can:



For the mad scientist vibe, I made the bubbles green and added a stripe with the label on it. To fit the text onto the very lo-fi sprite, I scaled the pixel art up by 10x and I hope the resolution-mismatch doesn't bother any pixel art purists too much.



I'm not colorblind, but, thinking of you, @JobLeonard, I glanced this over and formed a hunch that the red text on green background would be troublesome for at least someone out there. Even to me it kind of strains my eyes even though I can't explain why. So I just made the text black.



For my next trick, I had to figure out how to introduce Dr. Crawford, a wheelchair-bound high school Biotech teacher who first appears in episode 2. In episode 1 every character is just a face portrait, which doesn't give you any information about body type or disability. I can't afford to render a full body for every character, which means Crawford will be getting some special treatment if I show him full-body. I'm hoping I can pull that off without causing too much of an "othering" effect visually. For example, I think it would be bad if every character had facial expressions, but Crawford didn't because the body and wheelchair take up all the space or I can't afford to get multiple full-body frames drawn, etc.

For the wheelchair, I found this set on OpenGameArt:



I knew I could use that wheelchair, but the human sprites made to go with it were all split up into interchangeable body parts, hair styles, accessories, etc. in a way that was too overwhelming to figure out. (Impressive and useful for other purposes, though!)

So I grabbed a full-body sprite from the same asset pack as the portraits:



And I decided to try manually combining the body and the wheelchair into one sprite for Crawford.



Again, I have violated the rules of pixel art by scaling the wheelchair and the person by different amounts and combining them.

There's no room for facial expressions on that sprite, but every full-body sprite in the sprite pack I'm using corresponds to an animated face. This is the one for that body:



So what I'm thinking is, Crawford will enter scenes in the full-body form to establish his disability, but when he talks it will switch to the portrait so he can emote to the same degree as other characters.

It's tough making these compromises to bring the story to life. My inner critic wishes the whole thing were animated by professionals, and won't shut up about it. The realist in me knows I have to settle for things looking "good enough" and simply conveying the information that's required for the story, tone, and jokes to land.