@ TopherPirkl: Firstly, thanks for taking the time to even write a couple paragraphs regarding my game. It may seem strange, but there is something really humbling about knowing someone else looked at your art and designs and decided to muse about it. I don't mean to be cheesy. I appreciate it a lot. I'll try and coherently wrangle up a response.
Six months ago I took my first Printmaking course in college, I discovered intaglio, collograph and finally, the process that inspired me to make The Cairn, linoleum relief printing. Here is an early print of my very first linoleum print.
Tarot cards have always been a mystery to me, so when my professor told us to take a tarot card and re-imagine it into anything we wanted, so long as by the finish line it still could be visually read as a card, I took the idea and ran with it. There is something really addicting to the process of cutting into a hunk linoleum, slathering ink on it and putting it through a roller. There are no second chances with a block, if you make a bad cut, you have to live with it. Anyway, fast forward a few months.
I started drawing my first concepts for The Cairn around fourish months ago and proceeded to work with my programmer. I started to add color to everything, which in itself was a pretty time consuming process, until one day I sat down and considered 'why?'. Here's what the main character looked like with a little armor.
There are two angles to my decision, the first and probably more artistically important was the realization that I was emulating a style that already existed, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I went and looked at the woodcuts and even though I had seen them all before in Art History 374, I looked at them from a game-y point of view. All the information was there, the highlights, the blackest black areas, the middle tones. It all came from mark making, and it felt hand-made just from looking at it.
And I love them for their complexity disguised as simplicity. I had already done it with my printmaking assignments, so I decided to proceed with color out of the equation, and only consider value. I started asking the question 'What absolutely has to be understood by the viewer for the game to work?', which would be most things in a game like this, but there is a natural ambiguity that comes with woodcuts that fits the themes of the narrative. You wake up in a world that has undergone a change for the worse, you don't know why these things are attacking you, you don't know where the next door will put you. I like that a lot.
Second and more dopey reason is that I'm the only artist and not having to color things makes my life a lot easier. This game doesn't have the luxury of making a tileset and then going through and making levels in an editor. Everything is hand drawn, every level. Here's what is sitting in my Paint Tool SAI right now, begging to be worked on.
I think you get the idea.
So, to actually answer a few of your points. I'm not sure what we'll do with the background, I could easily draw some clouds, or some distant mountains (the beginning of the game takes place in a valley), or something else. I like your ideas regarding the art as actual drawings that have come to life, and if I go down that route, I'll likely make some sort of overlay that reads as papers, or some muted plate tone from the print.
Sorry to have drowned you with my response, but just the fact that you sat down to write as much as you did made me want to return the favor in kind.
I hope it's legible.
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