2. Art Styles and Logistics

After posting the last blog post, I’ve realized that weekly blogs that go over every detail of what happened in the group, is something that’ll sink a lot of my time (as someone who isn’t good at essay writing) so to manage my time more efficiently, I have decided to forgo that and instead have a post for every piece I work on as the artist going into detail with my progress and challenges I face.
Now moving on to the more important things, this week I’ve started sketching out and trying to figure out with our team what style of game we want as we also try and shape what storyline we are going for.

As you can see, I was testing out styles here. Currently, I believe pixel art is the way to go while I'm used to regular anime esk art it would homogenise my and the other artist’s styles so that the game is visually consistent (at least to the best of our abilities). I was also changing my brush settings and figuring out the best configurations to be able to do a pixel art style in Clip Studio Paint EX (my software of choice).

Not to mention, Amy’s software of choice is Procreate on the ipad. We realised that due to the different art programs, sharing artwork is going to be difficult. So we conducted a test, first we create a google drive folder to upload art assets, second, we try importing the other device’s normal file type, it seems that procreate and clip studio are not compatible. I notice that both provide an export to photoshop file type, so we try that however the issue became that the layers of the art were no longer separate. In the end, we had to give and decide that uploading separate png files for each layer would have to do, its a little painstaking depending on the number of layers you need, but what can you do.

In terms of story updates here is what I got (Taken from the meeting minutes):
Psychological narrative-driven game where players unlock the story and shape their world through choices. Main character (MC) interacts with objects, with passive-aggressive narrator reactions. Amnesia will be used as a storytelling tool for information dumps.
Narrator guides the player to find pieces of history, but not all. Narrator’s true goal is to learn the location of a missing prince. MC uncovers more than the narrator intends, leading to aggressive narrator reactions. As well as that, the MC learns that they were apart of this conspiracy. They learn this through entering paintings set up to display certain memories/ scenes that could lead to clues of the prince’s whereabouts.

Hopefully we'll get the timeline narrowed down more and I can get to working on art assets.