Spooktober 6th Annual Visual Novel Jam
This was a larger scale project where unlike most game jams, participants were given a whole month to work on in, much more than the usual few days. Makes sense, given that visual novels require a bit more writing time and polish amongst other things. With a whopping 4 artists on the team, we split up tasks and I was assigned backgrounds and in game assets while the others designed the characters themselves. The first 2 greyscale images were early concepts of Halloween street, the main hub for the game, with the final iteration being what you see in the middle left (or number 3, depending on how you're looking at it). The following graveyard scene was planned for the antagonist appearance, while the last two were background concepts that didn't make it into the game where the mentor character would be introduced. While I didn't create the design for this character, this was my own iteration of it.
While the other artists were working on the character designs, I was assigned to work on the basic zombie mob that the characters would be facing off. I initially struggled with what kind of clothes to put them in, but with the main theme being set in a colonial town, this is what I settled on with feedback from the writer/game lead. Although I had fun with this initial design, it didn't fit at all with the game aesthetic, as you will see below.
As mentioned before, the initial design didn't match with what the game aesthetic was going for so I had to rework it towards a more cartoony style, that was later readjusted to be a little more in line with the anime style that the character designers were going for. I also added a female variant since there was plans for a mob which would require more than just one variation of a zombie.
Not much to say here, just some variation to the zombie sprites themselves.
There was a planned scene for the zombies breaking out of the ground, though I was told to make it a sprite as we didn't have time to implement an entire cutscene/background for the idea. Building off the graveyard design of the the background artist, I implemented them into the design alongside the sleeves of the zombies I designed earlier. All in all, it came out well though figuring out enough variation in arms was trickier than expected since I also wanted each one to stand out from the other. Didn't think too hard about how the bodies fit together underground like this since no zombie anime ever really considers it too much. Besides, it looks cool like this.
Initially, the main character artist was also in charge of designing the in game masks that would work as the main game mechanic, but due to time limitations and workload, they were unable to get around to it. While it took a few iterations that I unfortunately didn't do a good job of keeping track of due to frantically designing them last minute from almost scratch, the final product are the three you see here: the owl for seeing the unseen, the witch doctor for cursing enemies, and the skull to cheat death. My personal favorite is the owl, mostly because the feathers turned out nicely. It was made completely of wood at first, but the game lead imagined feathers on the mask itself which I never considered. Pretty cool concept all in all.
There was a planned mini game where the player would be able to catch candy in a bag for points and this would have been the asset and background for it. It unfortunately never came to fruition, but I made the assets so you get to look at them here.
Besides the main background, I was also tasked with making the start screen, with a focus on going for a chibi style. While I was familiar with cartoon/anime styles, it was my first time going for true chibi and honestly, it was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Making proportions wrong on purpose to look good is a skill for sure. After quite a bit of readjusting, especially on a time crunch at this point, the final image you see on the bottom right (number 4?) turned out decent overall. The empty space was left there for the working title and UI that would come afterwards.
This was the planned ending scene for the first chapter of the game, which also never came about as the game didn't quite make it that far. The main antagonist design you see here was made by the character designer, Turtle (https://tyrtleart.itch.io/), while I made the background. A shame it won't be seen in game, but at least I can show it off here a bit.
GMTK Game Jam 2024 - Built to Scale
This was a project that I worked on with a group for the GMTK Game Jam 2024. The theme for it was Built To Scale where the team ended up going with a more literal interpretation of it, creating a game where you were a robot that was built to scale/climb your way back home. This was fun to work on since I hadn't used pixel art in awhile and was reminded of how much fun it was. While the game includes many more assets besides the images I included here (you can check out the game here https://rydalisdarx.itch.io/booting-back-up ), there was another excellent artist who put in a lot of work with the animation and implementation of the artwork into the game (they were also the main designer of the robot itself). As such, I really only included the stuff I personally worked on which were backgrounds, title/ending screen, early concept, etc etc.