#<- for my own future searching reference. Pretending the tumblr search function... functions

[trashclangen]

What do their cat sprites look like? Curious to compare them with the refs!!!

I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED!! Now I have an excuse to talk about My Design Process!! (Also take their game-given names as an added bonus bc idk when else this would come up lol)

In general, my design philosophy for Trashclan is "find the closest morph I can and then take liberty with the markings". Thankfully this is pretty easy because as long-time domestic animals... pigeons come in lots of colours!!

Orangesky:

I thought her sprite looked super striking so I tried very very hard to match it to a pigeon as close as I could!! Translating the hearts was easy (keeping them consistently shaped is another story, but I'm willing to suffer for her <3), 90% of the work was in me digging around searching for the closest brown pigeon morph I could manage... and some weird recessive dilute situation came through for me!! I'm honestly surprised I managed to find something with both the browns and the grey lmao

Her name I was also pretty attached to by the time I put the run of the game down, but orioles uh... do not exist in this country c': I briefly considered changing it to "Blackbird" or "Thrush" because those are birds in the same family, but pretty much immediately settled on "Orange" because it just kinda looked similar enough for me to be really happy with it! I always knew I was gonna ditch the whole "star" suffix thing for worldbuilding reasons, shoutout to Pav who suggested "sky" bc it 100% keeps the energy of her game-given name and is in general just a rlly good name fhbefr

Ermineleaf:

Ermineleaf was a no-brainer, I took one look at their sprite and went "oh, that's a standard blue bar pigeon" lmao I think I briefly debated changing their prefix to "stoat" because while we have those there (invasive), idk if they moult into their white winter coat and officially earn ermine status... but it was another name I was pretty attached to so I decided to let it slide lol

Bitternfleck:

Straight up, he's just based on my real life pigeon but old and droopifed lmao. My pigeon has pearl eyes, aka she looks haunted by the knowledge of the wilds at all times and I thought that was a perfect translation for the bright cyan

Buttercupfledge:

This design was also a pretty easy 1:1 translation! The majority of the decisions here were just simplifying the pied spotting, aka something I would have done even if she was a cat lol. I also made the call to give her no wing-barring even tho her sprite is striped, also for simplifying reasons.

Settling on "fledge" as the suffix for apprentices was also a no-brainer bc it's... simply the age at which they're fledging! Easy!

Bonus Fringeclaw bc yes he was a real character in the game that I real killed in the first moon:

Fringeclaw is a perfect example of a totally standard cat name that I changed to be bird-applicable! Pigeons don't have teeth but they do have claws, easy swap!

His design is the furthest I departed from the sprite, I genuinely don't think I looked at it when I coloured him in the moon he's in, I just knew he was brown and I wanted him to share colours with Orangesky lmao