A couple months back, my teammates
Pierre-Luc Poirier,
Ian Girard and I decided it was time to make a good game. A single player experience, not a silly little arcade multiplayer game like Greedy Piggy Chase or Super Punchball. We had an idea for a game about exploration (like everybody else), but this time it'd REALLY be about exploration. I'm not gonna say anymore for now! It's a SECRET, but I'll tell you guys soon
But for now, let's talk
art development. As soon as the idea popped in my head, I started doodling a whole lot, always carrying around a sketchbook and just doodling stuff I'd like to see in that fantasy world of ours. In about a month I had a whole sketchbook full of this:
And some mock-ups like this.
I think the whole chibi, simple, no bullshit, cute animal characters is pretty cool. It'll give characters a lot of personality, even if they end up really small on screen. We can play with stereotypes, give the world a lot of diversity, and just have fun with many animal races.
At this point, we had a 4th member join Neverpants -
Yann Ben Alluch, artist extraordinaire. The pressure was on - that guys is quite excellent at art stuff. I gotta step up my game!
At first, I was pretty sure I'd want to do the game in black and white, but my Neverpants partners convinced me otherwise. I'm glad they did.
The first digital mock-up I made was really not satisfying. I scrapped it in about 30 minutes. It's too flat, the lines are stiff and cold, and the colors were just plain bad. I was probably super tired when I did that one, trying to force it out of me at 4am or something.
So I started doing a billion tests of style and color. Just trying out different strokes, different coloring, different everything. I made a couple sheets like this:
I gave myself a bit of time to think, then came up with a second digital mock-up. I needed to just try something, to know what worked and didn't work, what direction we should take or not. No pressure to be perfect, just dump whatever I felt like drawing.
So this happened:
It's alright, although it feels a little flat to me, and not rough enough. It's super empty - I was planning to fill up the screen with stuff, but that would have been pointless, I think. I already knew that this wasn't quite it. But I was getting closer.
I got a bit depressed the week after, having no time to work on this game for a while, and getting worried about the scope of the game (thanks, Double Fine Adventure documentary episodes!). Every night, I'd go to bed thinking about the art style I wanted. Started thinking about a very dense, rough style for the game, to make the game world as rich as possible without going into realism. And I finally got it out of my brain and onto the screen, this saturday.
I'm still not 100% happy with it, but now I kinda know where I'm heading. Yann's making his own mock-up too, which we'll see sometime soon, then we'll discuss what we like and what the next step is going to be.
More mock-ups and doodles soon! Oh and maybe I'll tell you guys what the game is about!
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