Character select screen

The character select screen is a menu screen where players can select what character they want to play as during Freeplay mode. It was added in version 0.5.0.

Overview

Boyfriend's "new unlock" animation in the Freeplay menu, alerting the player that a new character is available.

The character select screen is activated upon pressing the Tab key in the Freeplay menu. When accessing the select screen for the first time and/or when a new character is added, a short animation will play of the screen lighting up via stage lights and the new character will be revealed; subsequent visits will skip the animation. From there, players will be asked to choose their "dipshit", to which there are 9 slots (though currently, only Boyfriend and Pico are playable). Each character has their own supporting character, and they are displayed on the left.

Characters not yet unlocked have locks as icons and are replaced with staticky, indiscernible grey stand-ins.

Selecting a character from the menu will cause them to play a short animation, and then the player will be taken back to Freeplay mode with the character they selected now being playable.

When a new playable character is added, Boyfriend will enter a new animation in Freeplay, and the game will notify the player that a new character is selectable.

Characters

Boyfriend; supporting character: Girlfriend.
Pico; supporting character: Nene.

Trivia

Choosing a character and then immediately hitting Backspace or Esc will cause the playable character and their supporting character to enter a disgruntled, surprised, or embarrassed face, and their selection will be canceled.
When holding down the arrow keys, the cursor will be in-sync with every quarter note of the background song's BPM.^[1]
The camera pans ever so slightly depending on where the cursor is located.^[2]
During a Twitch stream on the 18^th of September, 2024, PhantomArcade confirmed the 5 self-insert playable characters purchased via the $5,000 Kickstarter pledge reward will not be part of the 9 characters.^[3] How these characters will be implemented has yet to be seen.
The assets for the staticky figure are referred to in the game files as randomChill, and the figure's sprite is labeled as random character in the character select screen FLA, possibly meaning that it was originally intended for when the player hovered over a "Random" button on the character select screen. This is further supported by a mock-up sketch found in the FLA with a question mark as an option on the select menu and text under an early version of the staticky figure that reads "Random". Currently, no button for randomly selecting a character exists.
An early, unfinished version of Tankman's name graphic was accidentally left in the character select screen FLA when the developers published the Flash files for the playable Pico update on the game's GitHub art repository.
PhantomArcade posted a teaser image of an earlier, unfinished version of the character select screen in a news post titled "What a fuckin year, man" on his Newgrounds account.^[4] An image similar to the one displayed on PhantomArcade's tablet can be found, in full resolution, in the game files, under the name placement.png, though the latter is more desaturated and lacks Girlfriend.

Gallery

Boyfriend's name on the character select screen.
Pico's name on the character select screen.
The name that appears when a character has yet to be unlocked on the character select screen.
Boyfriend's canceled select animation.
Pico's canceled select animation.
Idle animation for a locked character.
Ditto, but static.
Animation of a locked character sliding in.
Animation of a locked character sliding out.
Animation of a locked character unlocking into a new character.
Animation of a locked character failing to unlock.
Teaser image showing progress on the character select screen, posted by PhantomArcade.