Cleric Origins | Patreon Weekly #281

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m sharing some trivia on the Cleric’s earliest concepting origins.

There’s also a new Shattered Secrets this week! This secrets focuses on some new visuals I’m working on for the title screen!

Also, here are the results for Patreon Poll #58, which asked people to vote on which Patreon rewards they most liked:
78%: Patreon Weeklies
28%: Audio Q&As
33%: Patreon Discord
60%: Loyalty Pins
36%: Patreon Polls (Gold+ Patrons only)
53%: Patreon Alphas (Gold+ Patrons only)
76%: Shattered Secrets (Shattered Patrons only)
This is mostly in keeping with the results of previous surveys, so it is nice to see things stay fairly consistent. As always, the early revealing of content (whether via posts or alphas) is the most popular type of reward. The only notable change is a big swing in how much people like polls, going from one of the more popular rewards to below 40%! I’d be interested in hearing why some of you might be less excited about polls these days, if anyone has any thoughts on that.

And lastly, there’ll be an audio Q&A next week! You can ask questions here or in the Patreon discord.

Cleric Origins

While it may not make much sense, in a way the Cleric was actually the first character ever added to Pixel Dungeon! Way way back around 2015 I found a screenshot from Watabou showing off a hero class that never ended up existing, played in a version of the game before classes were even added (You can see a bunch of other stuff from very early PD here too!):

Nowadays I have a complete archive of old Pixel Dungeon versions, and it turns out this sprite was the hero’s sprite from v0.1.0 until v0.1.2 (Dec 2012), a span of about 6 days, before PD was even on Google Play! After this the hero sprite visually became the Rogue, then classes were later added in v0.3.4 (Apr 2013). You can see their cloth armor spritesheet from v0.1.0 here:

This is completely a guess, but I suspect this sprite was originally going to be the ‘Ranger’, before Watabou decided to scrap that class concept, and later reworked it into the ‘Huntress’ for v0.5.3 (Oct 2013). The original Pixel Dungeon still has some references to the Huntress previously being called ‘Ranger’ in the game’s code.

I really liked the idea of re-introducing this part of the game’s history, and so the cleric’s very early concepts were directly inspired by this sprite, even if the details and motivations for them have changed quite a lot since. In that sense the Cleric is a reincarnation of the very first hero design ever added to the game!

I’ve starting development of this reincarnation in earnest now, and while I’m not quite ready to show off anything yet, expect future weeklies to start showing off quite a bit!