Practicing Art Style
Although I couldn’t do much without a narrative / the dialogue, I still wanted to practice the possible art style of the game. In Violet’s Dates, it doesn’t explicitly say the art style, so I have looked on Pinterest and Instagram for ideas that will best convey the vision. Eventually, I came up with this art style concept:
Concept 1
As we can see here, I did a few experiments with the art style, when I was done with he first iteration, I asked my partner for feed back and he said:
Criticism:
“It looks too feminine, the features that give this impression are the jawline, nose and the face is too close together.”
So, for my next iteration, I focused on trying to make the jawline more masculine. This is an easy fix as all I had to do was make it slightly longer and more square shaped:
Concept 2
I like this version of art style concept more, I took the criticisms and changed the art style and see that it has made the character look more masculine. One feature that I think that masculinised the face were thickening the eyebrows. However, I was facing another problem- this art style still looked like my art style. For a dating sim game, I wanted to go down the classical anime Otome game inspired art style. I stopped here for a while to look at this style and apply it to my work: Otome style.
Once I had looked at other examples of Otome art styles and analysed their essence, I came up with this art style inspired by this look:
I think what separates this from the other concepts is that I find that this style usually has a harsh ring light that highlights the hair and nose, which I have evidently added here. Another stylistic choice that was made was the eyes. In most of those type of games, eyes are typically narrower which gives them more of a masculine appearance.