Adventures in game image editing

I learned an important lesson in game development the other day: If you're going to do it all by yourself, at least put the effort in everywhere, including the parts you're not so good at (for me, that is art) so you don't look like a fool.

Case in point: The "bat" monster image didn't look at all like a bat. The body was WAY too big, the wings too small, the eyes were all wrong, and the talons were in the wrong place on its body. These issues are all fixed in the new version:

Note that the image is intentionally grayscale, because the game recolors it for display - Bats, like all the game's monsters, have various elemental variations - Fire, Electric, Water, etc. - and the game applies RGB reduction rules to the base image to produce the final results. For the case of the Fire Bat, the relevant rule is Red 100%, Green 0%, Blue 0% - this results in a red bat.