Halfway through concept art

This week I tackled Viola's artstyle and look. It was getting hard to explain the game without some sort of visual: everybody has a slightly different idea when you say "JRPG". Plus, I needed to iron out what the game would actually look like, both for myself as well as to talk with others about it.

I worked primarily on a "battle" concept art, and also a bit on what the platforming would look like. I didn't finish up either: had I focused on one I probably would've been able to.

Click the read more button to read... more.

Conceptually, It Looks Good

I had made sketches earlier of what the battles would look like, including a menu flow, so it seemed logical to start there. I started with the menu's themselves. I went with a purple look because I figured it would match the game's name: using violet for Viola. In my sketches, the borders were a little upward, which is definitely gonna be an issue when 9-slicing them for the actual game. The font is very originally called "RPG Font", which I modified a little bit to make the letters less flat-looking.

I wrote down how battles would work in my design documentation, which I keep up regularly (around 30 pages now!).

To recap:

• Characters and monsters can perform an action when their speed gauge is full
• "Attack" is a simple physical attack
• "Abilities" lets them use an ability, which costs AP (Ability Points) or RP (Rage Points)
• "Guard" lets the character take less damage
• "Run" will attempt to end the battle by fleeing
• Rage Points are built by taking damage
• If your HP runs out, your character is knocked out and can't do anything until revived

Aficionados might notice there is no "Item" option! Most items in JRPG's either heal the player or remove status effects. I want healing to be done passively by swapping out members of your party, to encourage the player to engage with NPC's. Thus, no items.

The system is basically a mixture of Chrono Trigger and Lufia 2. Chrono Trigger has a similar 'speed' system, and you can also swap out characters. The Rage Points are copied straight from Lufia 2.

A closer look at the character art.

I'm pretty satisfied with how the characters came out. In particular, I think Sybil (above on the right), Viola (above on the left) and Mallow (the skeleton in the first picture) came out really well. For somebody who doesn't draw that often and essentially picked up sprite art three weeks ago, I think they're pretty awesome.

The character on the left in the top picture, Emerald, also came back from character design hell. I wanted a fifth character to showcase how many characters you can have in your party at once, so I revamped her design a little bit. It's still not great, but it's better.

Emerald's new sprite and design.

Level idea and "concept art" all in one.

The platformer art I worked on in between. It's essentially a kid's sketch right now. I'm going to need a lot of time to get the background to look right. I'm sort of dreading it: I've never been good at drawing backgrounds.

The grass itself somehow ended up taking almost six hours. Not because it was hard to draw, but just because I had no idea what I wanted it to look like. I started looking at platformers like Celeste and Meat Boy: simple aesthetics with small characters. On the right you can see the result of that: rocky tiles with a straight side view.

The rocks were an issue because I didn't like the way it looked. Not just because it looked barren, that could have been fixed by drawing more grass. The angle itself just didn't sit well with me for some reason. So I compared with prettier looking sprite games like Owlboy and started drawing with angles seen in that game's backgrounds.

Owlboy (2016)

Despite the flat characters in Owlboy, the backgrounds are not. And it looks great, so I used a similar angle for the floor in my own WIP concept art. I don't think I'll ever get on the level of art seen in Owlboy, but that's not really what I'm going for, either.

Hopefully I'll be able to finish both pieces next week.