removed the glow effects because that isn't really in-line with isaac's graphical standard. I'm still not totally happy with the cross on the Gaper and Gaper-likes' head? I like the idea but it just doesn't look quite right in-game.
Looking at it now it's probably too detailed.

feel like I'm still in the process of nailing down isaac's decisions with line weight

working on my first Isaac mod to learn the art style by making custom variants for enemy champions, rather than them just being the basic sprite+colored tint. First replacement test for the doublevis looks great! Animation looks good and the ribbon successfully changes color to indicate exactly which champion it is.

Last time I talked about the characters that start with different strengths, but ultimately still get through the game in the same way, merely taking different angles to do so.

This time I will talk about… not that. I will begin with a few examples.

The Lost is a character that cannot receive health upgrades and gets only one free hit per room before dying. You can use their ability to fly over gaps and shoot tears through solid obstacles to avoid danger, unless there aren’t any of these, in which case you must resort to your dodging skills. Your active item can be used to reroll useless items, such as any health-related ones, but it also has a chance to make them disappear. Also, since you have no health to be able to spend on devil deals, you instead get to pick one of them for free, with the other options disappearing.

Got all that? Cool. Here’s another.

The Forgotten is a skeleton who does not attack with tears, but rather with a bone club. This club has a melee attack and can be charged to throw like a boomerang. It has unique synergies with many of the game’s shot-type items. You can also press the ctrl key to take control of a ghost that pops out of the skeleton. It fires normal tears, and can fly and shoot through walls like The Lost, but is tethered to the skeleton and cannot stray too far from it. The ghost can only have soul/black hearts, while the skeleton can only have bone hearts (and gains bone hearts from health upgrades). They each have their own half-capacity healthbar, and you die if either of them dies. The skeleton is invincible but unmoving while you control the ghost.

Wow that one was kinda crazy anyways next up there’s

Tainted Keeper uses coins for health and can only have up to 2 max health. Every enemy has a fairly high chance to drop a rapidly-disappearing coin upon death, so if you’re quick you can use your slow-but-powerful quad shot attack to get a ton of money… which you’ll need, because Tainted Keeper can only obtain items by buying them. Furthermore, every shop on every floor will be loaded with items, including not just those from the shop pool, but from other pools as well. The whole game becomes a fast-paced capitalist fever dream, in which you quickly become a being of godlike power and die just as quickly, your health unable to go beyond a mere two hits (except when it can, like… sometimes… this game is complicated).

You doing alright? Still keeping up? No? Me neither.

Next we have TAINTED MMMMOTHERFUCKING CAIN. Tainted Cain can’t pick up items! Instead he puts resources in his magic bag and once he gets enough he can craft the items for himself! Certain resources generally produce certain kinds of items, and rarer resources generate stronger items, but most of the recipes are randomized every run, with a few hardcoded exceptions. Learning what resources produce what, generally, more or less, is super important! If your bag is all full on resources but you don’t want the item you’d be crafting you can swap out a resource for another, which destroys the first. You can end up with a lot of really insane item builds as Tainted Cain since you can choose whether or not you want an item and reroll it very easily.

Okay… okay… so that’s four out of like…

… 34 characters. Fucking hell.

So yeah, this is basically the opposite of the IWDI approach. Not all of these characters are specifically from the Repentance DLC but Repentance dialed it up to 11 to the extent that I’m calling it the Repentance approach to playable characters. In other words, “Different characters should have wild gimmicks that completely change the game. Multiple games in one game!!”

It works really fucking well for keeping the game fresh. It’s probably hard as hell to design for, with all the hardcoding and whatnot. It basically guarantees that everyone will have at least one character they hate. There are a lot of Tainted Cain haters and I don’t understand he’s so fucking cool guys what the fuck he’s sick as hell

Repentance is good. If you have the ability, be like Repentance. Or don’t. This isn’t the “right” model. It’s just potentially a very very cool one.