Category: Role Development

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Deciding on a Colour Palette – 2nd Iteration

In preparation for our meeting, me and Izzy collabed on a Miro board and shared our ideas for both character style and environment colours. I said to her that I think that the game would work best with pinkish hues. 

On Tuesday, we had a meeting with Sophie to discuss colour palettes and how to come to a cohesive style. One of the things that have stuck with me is making a thumbnail colour plot. Seeming as this task was quite easy, I helped make the thumbnail sketches to see which colour palette would look the best with Yami. Here are the thumbnail sketches that I came up with: 

Once I had completed them, I showed my group mates but after a closer inspection, I decided to eliminate 3 of them as some of them don’t align with the colour palette I had discussed with Izzy. 

Communication in the Discord!

Survey! 

When me and Izzy had finished with our thumbnails, I made a google forms and sent it out to around 15 people. These are the questions that I asked on the form: 

  1. Choose one out of these thumbnails has a mermaid vibe 
  2. Which one out of these look visually appealing? 
  3. We’re planning on using the colours for the you see on this logo for the UI, which thumbnail would look best if the UI had these colours? 
  4. Out of all the thumbnails, which one do you think reaches all the requirements as listed above? How would you change it if you could? 
  5.  

 Results: 

From these results, we have come down to the conclusion that colour thumbnail D would be the best looking out of the 6 for the game.

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Yami Development – 3rd Iteration

Once we had the meeting with Sophie about colour palettes and thumbnails, the team has finally come down to the conclusion of a finalised colour palette that was picked out by a survey which can be found here. 

The next step from here is to remake Yami’s design and fit the environment a bit more. As the background uses no line weight variety and little shading, I looked at a couple of artists that have the same art style as Izzy’s. Once I had looked at these artists, I didn’t bother with a mood board and just switched between drawings whilst I was drawing Yami. Here are the images I used and I mainly used @freshboba_tae on Instagram as reference for this new art style (I have been a follower of her art for a very long time, she inspired me a lot growing up!). 

Process: 

This time, I wanted to approach my design process a bit more different. By this I mean that I wanted to complete a sketch on Procreate and import it to another software that supports vector layers. This is because I have noticed that in Procreate, whenever I slightly transform the drawing, the pixels become a bit deformed and it doesn’t look very nice, especially if the main attraction will be the character. I tried to do the drawing on Adobe Illustrator on iPad, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the brushes to change them, so I went to ClipStudioPaint to complete the line art layers.  

Base sketch (Procreate) 

Although it isn’t as noticeable here, but the pixels get quite deformed, hence why I moved to a different software. 

Line art 

 For the line art. I had to change the default g-pen to decrease the pressure output. This is to make it so when I draw, the line weight won’t be affected by the amount of pressure I put down so it stays relatively consistent. 

Base colours 

Rendered 

Against the background 

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Yami Development – 2nd Iteration

When I had finished the first iteration of Yami, something felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. After a couple of days of not looking at him, I had finally come to a conclusion as to why I thought the way I did. For me, I didn’t think that his original design truly displays his personality, and as a character designer, it’s my job to expand on and change a character’s design if I see fit. So I started to mood board an idea of what his new look could look like + neaten up the art style. 

When I was picking out the images for Yami, I wanted to give him sharp edges as line art and broader shoulders. For his design, I didn’t want to go too crazy with the changes. I wanted to keep his original design aspects in the new design, more specifically, his leopard print.  

Design Process 

Rough Sketch

Detailed Sketch

Rough Colours

Finalised Colours

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Narrative Design

As our world designer is hard to contact and usually never in class, me and Izzy have decided to both team up and make the narrative ourselves. As I had the most experience in narrative storytelling through dialogues and know roughly how the dialogues work in dating simulators, I’ve decided to get the ball rolling by writing the introduction dialogues so it acts like a guideline and be the editor for Izzy’s dialogues.

Drafting the intro:

I have made a Google document for me and Izzy to make the dialogues. I decided to (sort of) adopt the classical screenplay layout as in my opinion, it looks quite straightforward to understand. There is a key highlighted at the top of the document so that it’ll be easier for our technical designer to input in the game.

Intro Script:

At the end of a scene I communicated that if the player were to read this at a leisurely pace, it would reach the maximum time, but if the player skimmed the dialogues (like what I sometimes do in dating sim games) it will consequently take a shorter amount of time. This is important to remember as when we showcase our work at the end of year show, people will be skimming our game to get to the other games on display.

When I was reading through Izzy’s script, I was very impressed with how she nailed the fluidity of the dialogues! (Big well done to her)

Aside from the normal grammatical checks and few dialogue tweaks, I made a few suggestions (highlighted in blue) and an idea (highlighted in purple) we could incorporate into the game:

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Yami Development – 1st Iteration

This week, I started to make progress on Yami’s idle, I chose to reference a fairly casual pose. When I draft out my ideas, I try to use confident long lines rather than short lines that appear scruffy.

When I was done with my first draft, I asked my partner what he thought about the perspective. This is because when I draw for a period of time, my eyes get used to the drawing and ignores all the flaws, which is why I needed someone to point out what could be potentially wrong with the image before I proceed onto the line art and rendering. There were a few things that I didn’t realise that were wrong with the drawing until he pointed them out for me:

Once I had refined my sketch more, I quickly drew out the line art. I also added a belt onto his design

By using the selection tool, I filled the areas with colours and began to render:

I found this part quite hard in the sense where I just kept on shading the same areas for it to lead no where as I would restart again. But eventually, I got the end product!

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Art Style Concepts

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.

RESEARCH PAGE HERE

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: