Paw & Sword has 45 hero classes, and every hero can climb through seven ranks: Normal, Rare, Superior, Epic, Legendary, Heroic and Mythic. Each rank gets its own look. That is 315 versions of a hero before you count animations. The art problem is not "how do I draw 315 cats". It is "how does a player still know who is who after the hero ranks up three times".
The answer I landed on is a single rule: one cat per class. This post is about that rule, why I needed it, and how I check it.
The problem: rank-ups that replace your hero
In an early version, each rank look was designed fairly freely, and the cat underneath drifted. A class could start as, say, a grey tabby at Normal, turn up with ginger fur at Epic and with different eyes again at Mythic. Each image was fine on its own. Together they broke the game.
Here is why. In an idle tycoon, the bond with a hero comes from time. You watch the same knight walk to the field every day, see them get knocked out by a boss, see them come back with a better sword. When the hero ranks up and suddenly has different fur, a different face and different eyes, it does not feel like a promotion. It feels like someone replaced your cat.
There was a practical problem too. In a busy hunting ground, players identify heroes by silhouette and colour long before they read a name. If the colours shift with every rank, the town becomes harder to read exactly when it gets more crowded.
The rule: the cat stays, the outfit grows
Every asset of a class now shows the same cat. Fur colour, pattern, where the white patches are, eye colour, face and ear markings, fur length: all of that is fixed per class and never changes between ranks. What changes is everything the cat wears and carries.
- Normal looks like a recruit: simple clothes, a basic weapon.
- Middle ranks add better materials, trim, a cape or a shoulder piece.
- Top ranks get ornate armour, glowing details and a more dramatic weapon, but the same face looks out from under the helmet.
To make the rule usable, each class has a written identity sentence, something like "grey tabby, white chest and paws, amber eyes, a notch in the left ear". That exact sentence is reused for every asset of that class: portraits, small "chibi" figures, cards, summon reveals, story pictures and animation strips. If a new image does not match the sentence, it is wrong, however good it looks.
One subtlety: the recruit look matters most. When you summon a hero, the reveal shows the Normal look, so that is the first impression. All later looks are built forward from it, never the other way round.
Designing 45 classes that do not blur together
Keeping one cat consistent across ranks solves half of the problem. The other half is keeping 45 different classes apart. A few principles help:
- Silhouette first. A tank carries a big shield, an archer a long bow, a Sumo is wide, a Ninja is narrow. If two classes have the same outline at hunting-ground size, one of them changes.
- Fur and outfit colours as a pair. I avoid two classes sharing both fur colour and outfit colour. Sharing one is fine.
- Odd classes earn their place with a clear job. A Battle Chef or a Ghost Butler (working names) is fun, but the fun only lasts if the player understands what they do in a fight.
- Personality in the pose. The idle pose already tells you a lot: a proud paladin, a sleepy monk, a fidgety thief.
Checking it: contact sheets and an identity checklist
Rules only help if you check them. For every class, I make a contact sheet: the old row of looks, the new row, and the reference cat on the left. Then I go through a short checklist.
- Is it the same cat in every look? Fur, pattern, white areas, eyes, markings.
- Did only the cat change in a redrawn file? Outfit, weapon, pose and framing must stay as they were.
- Do the looks still rise from Normal to Mythic? A higher rank should never look plainer than a lower one.
- Is the eye colour right? It is the detail that slips most often, and players notice it on portraits.
When a file fails, only that file is redone. That keeps fixes small, which matters when there are hundreds of files. The same identity sentence also feeds the animation work, which I describe in keeping sprite animations consistent, and the movement work in teaching pixel cats to walk in 8 directions.
What this changed in the game
The rule is invisible when it works, which is the point. A hero you recruited on day one is the same cat on day thirty, just better dressed. The rank-up moment now reads as "my knight got promoted" instead of "who is this?". And because colours stay stable, a crowded field with twenty heroes is easier to follow.
It also made production calmer. Before, every new look was a fresh design decision. Now most of the decisions are already made, and the creative work goes into what should be different: the outfit, the weapon and the sense of growth.
