The Cleaner
A janitor became a playable character in one day, with a mop used as a staff. His sprite broke on a non-integer downscale, his first smoke test changed the rule for every melee character, and a second test said his best move needed to last longer.
Written up later from the repo's history and dated to the days it describes.
The Cleaner joined Earfh's roster on October 17. He is a janitor who fights with a mop held like a bo staff, a melee specialist at the Last Straw's health and a little faster. Killing 40 Cleaner Bots hires him. His ability is Bo Spin, an invulnerable spin through the crowd that ends in a strike, with a 9 second cooldown.
A sprite that would not shrink
The first Cleaner sprite was made at 96 pixels and shrunk to 62, a factor of 0.65. Nothing about that is a clean pixel ratio. The agent doing the work tried a k-centroid downscale, nearest neighbor and a box filter, and every one came out mushy. A pilot generated natively at 64 by 64 cost $0.18 and was clean, so the answer was to stop shrinking and start at the right size.
A rotation step at the pixel art provider then failed six times with "provider busy", and was never charged. A walk sheet built in code shipped first, so the Cleaner could be played that day, and the real art followed in a second PR the same day. His strike and kick animations are cut into the frames, and nothing plays them yet.
The first smoke changed the rule
The first build showed him as a hybrid, with a railgun and a single mop. The owner's response was about the whole roster. "This is how melee specialists should work. Ranged specialists don't even have it to equip." A melee specialist should not carry a gun, and a ranged specialist should not carry a melee weapon.
The same message said Bo Spin and Kata, his mop special, "had no effect" and that there was no animation to see. Two fixes landed within hours. Six characters became melee only, with a main hand and an off hand that swing in turn on one press: the Swole Patrol, Bro Magnon, the Rabid Bum, Herbert, the Hoagie Baron and the Cleaner. Dorcas became a hybrid. And both moves got drawn visuals, with an afterimage every 22 pixels, rings and stars, and no change to their damage.
Dorcas had been given alternating dual melee on October 13, four days earlier, and the new rule superseded it.
The second smoke
After the second test the note was that Kata worked but needed to last longer, move slower and cover more ground. The animation became 1.6 times slower, and Wet Floor, the Cleaner Bot's streak, grew to 130 pixels and 8 seconds.
What is next
His radio lines and voice are still being worked out, and the art for his ability icon is a placeholder.