Chronically Amber
Game Jam - Chronically Amber
Roles: Project Manager, Game/Art Director, Artist, Animator
Time Limit: One Week
Chronically Amber is an endless runner about an influencer trying to survive the internet. She's prone to big-headedness from too much validation, and also very sensitive to mean comments.
Promo Art
Concept Art
The first thing I did after our group decided on the kind of game to make, was to design our protagonist.
The concept we had was "Chibi Girl running through the internet."
So I thought about what I didn't want to see when we thought of the internet, and the colors that I wanted to avoid using because it was too predictable.
Specificially I wanted to avoid a Cyberpunk color palette for Amber, because my teammates seemed to want to use neon pinks and a dark landscape for the actual game.
Walk Cycles
Most of my time during this project was spent animating Amber's walk cycles. She has two forms, and since we were doing a 2.5D game, I had to make 2 different sprite sheets.
I designed her 2nd form and noticed that when broken down into the sprite sheet, her head swayed instead of just the pigtails. This is something I didn't have time to fix, but I learned that I needed to align things manually in Unity to fix it.
This was my first time making 2D sprites that were animated for a game, so I made sure to make this gif version for my devlog page so that people could see what my intentions were for the actual walk.​
Her other form is called Petal Armor, which was inspired by my favorite singer, Hayley Williams's debute solo single, "Simmer."
Playable Video
Backgrounds
This is what the initial version of the background in game looked like without any concept art.
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Since we had such a limited amount of time, the two programmers I was working with had to use temporary assets to make sure the game would be working within 5-6 days.
That left me constantly working on art, not having too much time to watch what my teammates were doing.
I gave them constant updates, and everything was voted on to make sure we didn't deviate from the group's ideas while not checking in.
When it came to the internet-scape, my inspirations were movies like Pixel Perfect (an old Disney Original Movie/DCOM) and Ralph Breaks the Internet from Disney/Pixar.
I always pictured Amber running through a white endless hallway, like she was having to look through the bright light of her phone.
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When it came to picking Amber's colors, I made sure that regardless of what color theme we did for the background, she would stand out.
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I always wanted her hair color to stand out the most, so in terms of saturation, her teal/seafoam hair is the brightest out of every color.
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The orange of her hoodie is almost brown on its own, and the shorts and hoodie are also darker versions of her hair color.
For the darker concept, I was trying to make sure I used all of the same colors and just changed the values to make sure that Amber and her bright hair would still stand out. I didn't want her dark shorts or middle-toned skin to get lost in the road. I added this small glow to her that was meant to be a sort of rim lighting from the door in front of her.
I asked my teammates if we would get to use walls like in this background, unfortunately, we weren't able to implement them because there wasn't enough time to find out how to make them cycle like those old western backgrounds in old movies.
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In the end, after asking friends and family members, this darker background scheme won when the prompt of "the internet as a space" was given.
