Hello there! Welcome back to my weekly game development blog where I share my experiences as an indie game developer and show off the realistic workload I do each week. This week seems to have flown by, I have spent most of my time working on art for SpiritSweeper and haven't had the chance to do much work in my own time. However, it's still been a productive week as I have been working on my final essay for university.
At the beginning of the week, I got added to the Microsoft teams group for the Falmouth 2023 games expo. Which meant I could make a start on the artwork for our booth and promotional materials at the expo in May. As a 3rd year team, we are provided with 2 large panels for promotional artwork that will hang next to each other on the back wall of our booth. This gives me a lot of freedom to work on a large canvas and add lots of detail which is exciting! I decided to go with a design that spans across the 2 panels as a whole scene but each panel is also used to highlight each of the two main characters of the game. I wanted to balance out the panels and make sure both Reenie and Oose had the same amount of spotlight. I've spent a lot of time this week working on getting it looking and feeling right and got a lot of feedback from the rest of Strange Folk Studios throughout the process. Seen below is a slide show of my progress on the artwork so far!
- Image 1: This is the first draft I came up with to show off what I was imagining the final piece to look like. The image depicts the main character "Reenie" (on the right) chasing after a "Cactitot" spirit (bottom left) with their SpiritBrush. Reenie is reaching out trying to catch the pesky spirit. Reenie's companion "Oose" (on the left) is shown standing on a chair looking annoyed about being covered in spirit imprint and is trying to shake it off. The scene is set from a low-angle perspective and takes place in Granny's kitchen from the first level of the game. The line in the middle is an indicator to me where the expo art will be chopped in half to be split into 2 panels.
- Image 2: This is an updated version of the background of the artwork showing Granny's kitchen and a chair without the characters. This was made to match the exact design of the kitchen seen in the game and blocks out the perspective lines more clearly.
- Image 3: Here you can see the characters re-added into the background from the image prior. Reenie is now fully drawn instead of just being a rough human pose. Some of the feedback I received on this was that the Cactitot should be more in the frame, Reenie's expression is too aggressive, and they look older than they are in the game. These were all valid points that I worked on later.
- Image 4: Based on the feedback given in Image 3, I reworked the scene by shortening the chair, making the spirit more in view, finalizing Oose, and changing Reenie's face and hair. I also added some rough guides as to where I wanted the spirit imprint to be in the scene when I do the final piece, this is marked in purple to match the imprint in the game.
- Image 5: I then started work on the line art for the piece now that I was happy with the sketch! This is the more up-to-date screenshot of the artwork, I have begun drawing in the background lines and will continue next week on adding in the characters!
Other than the primary expo artwork, I have also been working on in-game assets this week mainly for UI/UX. One of the pieces I finished this week was this meter that fills up as you
clean your client's homes! It takes the form of Reenie's SpiritBrush and will slowly color itself in as you clean.
As for personal work this week, like I said before I haven't had much time to do much work for myself. Honestly, the only non-work-related drawing I remember doing this week was a quick doodle of myself, I'll share it below!
- Image 6: Loose digital sketch mainly used as a warm-up before I went on to do other things. I'm personally a fan of how very quick lines can be used to give the impression of folds in clothing.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to read through this week's update log! I Hope to see you again next Saturday! :)
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