THIS POST HAS SOME SPOILERS ABOUT THE GAME, SO IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED IT YET, PLEASE DON'T READ FURTHER.
Introduction In this post, we will share some concept art and how we approached few things as our artists did many things for the first time.
Previously we have written about what went right and what went wrong and about our original game vision.
Concept art
We didn’t have much time to do concept art, but some of our team members already had a clear vision of how the characters would look like. To our artist it was much easier to follow that vision.
Mina was planned to be shy and kinda like a wallflower, she wouldn’t wear revealing clothes or stand out too much with her hair. Just your typical office worker.
Kiara was planned to be the “weirdo” and talkative person who is a bit into goth fashion. Our artists envisioned that she would be into Addams family and tragic love stories would be her favorite.
For the assets we thought of the office setting, just like in our previous game “Traum”. We wanted to show that now we could make our own assets because now we have two artists in our team.
Sprites
Like previously mentioned, our artist had no previous experience from making sprites so she tried to learn Spriter for this version. She learned the basics in about three days with experimenting and watching tutorials. For the future, we might animate the sprites frame-by-frame since we prefer the overall look of them. We also weren’t sure how stable the build would be, so the sprite doesn’t have that many frames for that reason.
Assets
Assets were drawn with a help of a program called Sketch Up. It provides 3D models of all kinds of furniture and buildings. Our artists took photos of the office furniture and supplies for correct isometric angle.
Our artist had never made a tile based assets before, so that was a learning experience. Drawing the tile assets was a bit tricky using bigger resolution so the assets would have more drawn look than traditional pixel art.
The Boss
In this demo, there is one boss which was made by both of the artists. We gathered inspiration from mummies and cysts but decided to change the cysts into eyes. At first we thought of creating a huge eyeball to the head, but we thought it didn’t look scary enough. Perhoslapsi (did the sprites and portraits) drew the lineart for the boss and then Onlyfeny (asset artist) added the shading and animated it in after effects. In the good ending, players were supposed to see a transformation where the boss turns back into a human.
Conclusion and future work
The game isn’t perfect and so many things could have been done better but we are more than happy of what we accomplished in this short amount of time. We were quite ambitious when it comes to our skills, as we continue learning more, we hope that it will show in our games in the future.
In the future, we will do major changes to the puzzles and hope to include a good variety of them but also few challenging optional puzzles that might give something extra to the story but doesn’t affect the progress of the main game.
We had this idea of adding a journal system so that all the hints you collect from the manifested objects could be found there written and drawn by Mina. We aren’t sure about the future of the inventory.
We would love to share updated demo in the future, that has more final work done and then later upload finished full version.
Hearing your feedback helps us to learn more and we value the time you have spent to play our game and sharing your thoughts, thank you.
This game is a submission to IGMC2018 and the rating is on. If you wish to rate our game go to this link: https://itch.io/jam/igmc2018/rate/336860