Drawn by hand
Every monster in Thumb & Tomb started as code. A rat was a few rectangles and a tail, a skeleton was lines for bones, a dragon was a box with a snout. They did the job, and they looked exactly like what they were: a programmer's placeholders.
The first rat
Then Theodore Roll, Tedy, started drawing them. The first thing he sent, in late September, was a rat with a ten-frame run cycle. That meant building a pipeline first. Tedy draws in full color, and the game has exactly four, so a tool now turns his art into the game's palette, at twice the game's detail, so a monster keeps its thin lines and its highlights as it shrinks into the distance.
One at a time
The skeleton came next, with a sixteen-frame idle, then the slime, the dragon, and the goblin. By the middle of October every monster in the game was his: the bat, the cultist, the orc, the wraith, a mimic that unfolds out of a treasure chest, and the smoldering piles of bones in a dragon's lair that collapse as you walk into them.
The dragon
A dragon guards every tenth floor, so it had to be the best of them. It fills the whole screen, and it breathes fire.
The old ones are still in there
The code-drawn monsters didn't go anywhere. They're an unlock now: buy them with Souls and OPTIONS > APPEARANCE > MONSTERS switches the whole bestiary back to the placeholders, if you want to see where it all started.
What's next
Tedy has since drawn the game's Steam store and library art, too. Thumb & Tomb is in development and coming to Steam.