#opal dev

so after i drew and cleaned up some sprites in a style i was happy with the next step for me was environments and figuring out a style for that. i am very rusty with drawing, environments especially, and wasn’t really happy with what i was doing even when i was trying to hasten the process by drawing over primitive blender models (as seen in earlier posts). so i took a break and decided to switch to the ui.

in a previous post, i mentioned the directions i was feeling for ui— namely stuff inspired by old alchemical illustrations, early typography and woodplates, venetian type, etc. i liked the idea of a deceptively simple frame with perhaps an accompanying illustration, maybe even something diegetic that represents the state of the game or the characters’ relationship with each other. i had fun exploring different possible motifs for it but stumbled onto a new problem: i now liked these explorations more than i liked the actual sprites i had decided were finished.

vns don’t need to be hyper-polished or even polished at all. there’re some phenomenal games out there with very simple styles— but as someone that isn’t entirely confident in the strength of my writing or my drawing alone, i am always aiming for a game i make to be more than the sum of its parts. so stylistic (art) decisions are as important as the plot beats to me, and i haven’t even really started _drafting_ the game yet. but that’s mostly because i also write for my day job so i don’t really wanna write in my free time rn lol.

anyway. i try bringing the sprites in with the ui, and i explore ideas of having spot illustrations or pop up panels for important beats and emphasis of dramatic moments— and, again, i like the sketches better than i like the finished art! i take the sprites and i start playing with them— desaturating them, running them through gradient maps, and eventually just saying fuck it and just sketchily drawing over them. the sketches always win, so i resign myself to accepting the fact that i am never going to be the one-man VN army that can churn out fully detailed background illustrations, character sprites, and bespoke ui that i want to. so that means i need to be strategic in my approach

when i go back to the drawing board, i identified 3 key priorities in what i want the look of the game to accomplish:

1. it has to be fun for me to draw

2. it has to be FAST for me to draw

3. i have to like how it looks when it’s done

which all feel very obvious to say, but i can’t have 2 and 3 without also having 1, and i never let myself settle for 1 and 2 without 3.

anyway, i saw angels egg for the first time in theaters and the hyper-minimalist compositions really made something click for me. in a lot of the darker scenes in the movie, the screen is mostly black save for very deliberate slivers of lighting, implying a more complex and dense environment than you would guess from spot blacks alone. really efficient usage of negative space. i figure, what the hell, let’s try that for backgrounds. at the same time, i am also attempting to figure out how to reuse all the lineart for the sprites that i did in a way to color them that feels both expressive and also cohesive with however i end up rendering backgrounds. i try to hasten the process by using gradient maps, but i don’t really like how they turn out.

in between the last two images, i explore a few different approaches to this cohesion of characters and environments.

the first one is the key idea that propelled me forward to the others; the second one here had the color scheme i really liked and less representational colors, and the third one was when i just gave in and did some lines over the background and character art. these ultimately led to me deciding to stick with the limited palette— shades of magenta for the apprentice and shades of cyan for the homunculus— and explore ways of doing minimalist compositions primarily made up of negative space, but with strategic uses of lines and gradients. i’m not totally sure where this leaves me on the character art front, so i explore different ways of using these limited palettes and potentially other styles as i also explore background styles (hence the last image that is wildly dense with drawings of the same 2 characters in a variety of styles)

i end up with this, and i am very happy with it. i am still undecided now on what i want the ui to look with— i had initially thought of having it switch between NVL mode and ADV mode, but i prefer the way sprites look while they’re framed, and i tend to be more of a prose writer in my personal projects than a script writer, so NVL mode generally appeals to me more. now the decision is between a long vertical ‘scroll’ that i think works well with the small framed portraits, or a wider and more square box that i think would pair nicely with unframed sprites

like this. i like the way it looks and i think it might play nicer with more environment compositions as i get to them, but in trying to move on to more places in the game i am not hitting it as easily the second time around (i hit the 10 image limit so i can’t post the failed attempt i most recently did, but that’s probably for the best lol). but my coworker gave me some good tips which is namely to focus on making the compositions, minimal as they may be, feel cramped. i think that strategy is going to lend itself well to some interesting framing but i also am wondering how easy it will be to draw a cramped space crowded with objects _fast_ which is again the whole crux of the issue that sent me here. but i am overall pretty happy with where these explorations have gone, so it’s not a loss

top outfits are for apprentice, the bottom ones are for the homunculus. tallied up opinions from friends to help me narrow down which ones id use for sprites since the game is mostly just the two characters i don't mind having multiple outfits for each character. the apprentice will likely have more than the homunculus but i still wanna explore...

apprentice notes:

hand-me-downs

practical (for a magical apprentice)

vaguely lebanese

homunculus notes:

born sexy yesterday

lab rat

90s fantasy anime

I also want as many of the individual clothing items to be reused for multiple outfits as possible and also. clothing thievery from the apprentice lol