Game Jam- Chronically Amber
ZenoJam8 - Theme: Never Give Up - 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.
My role was to act as Game Director, and as the only main artist, that would make me Art Director as well. I recruited another artist friend of mine to help with linework for the promo/cover art for the game and also emojis for Amber to react to obstacles she ran into.
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For this promo piece, the lineart is by Phoenix Arnett, and the colors and title are done by me.
Concept Art
This was her design before I deformed everything to fit the perspective and make her more "chibi."
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I drew her with a symmetry tool to make her as easy to animate as possible.
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.
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.
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.
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Her 2nd form is her Petal Armor shielded form. In game if she picks up 3 flower petals, she can protect herself from all obstacles. This idea was inspired by Hayley William's solo album Petals for Armor, and specifically the song Simmer, which is her debut single as a solo artist.
Game Jam- My Dating Agency (BG Artist)
Otome Jam 2024
Time Limit: 2 Months May 1-July 1
I've always wanted to try and do a lot of backgrounds for something like a comic or visual novel. I find that I really like making satisfying perspective illustrations, it's like having to solve the problem of "ok how does this fit?"
I like to make sure there's motion to something, that it doesn't just feel like a bunch of clip art.
I actually got a late start to this game jam. Since the end of ZenoJam 8 ran into the start of Otome Jam, when I got picked up to join this group as a background artist, I made sure to let the leader know that I wouldn't be able to start until a week in. But I told her, what would help would be if she already had a style, color palette, or a mood board I could work from. She ended up having a rough black-and-white mockup of the perspective and general styling for this office that the main character would spend a lot of time in.
​When it was finally time for me to start, I worked first on using the mockup she gave me as a way to test the color palette, because color is always my favorite step, and a lot of the time, it helps me get started with laying things out so that I can get into sketching and lining.
When I do backgrounds, I try not to line anything that isn't meant to stand out. So knowing that there was a clear foreground-middle ground-background to this first area, I knew that there would at least be lining around the computer and the chair. Anything else would be for shadows that were meant to help define sharp areas and contact shadows. I tried to pay attention to atmospheric perspective as well. These scenes were sometimes hard to light because there wasn't always a clear light source in view. So I often defaulted to making sure that the further something was from the camera, the lighter it got relative to what it would look like up close.
I'd say the part that took me the most time for this was the keyboard. It turned a one-point perspective into like 4 or 5 points because I thought it made more sense for the keyboard to be at an angle instead of just straight on.
At some point close to the end it seemed that the leader wanted to change the flooring because the tile was causing eye strain, so I went ahead and quickly changed it to a carpet texture.
I did this using a watercolor textured brush, first starting big, with a darker version of the chair color because She wanted something neutral. And then going a little smaller for shading when the carpet meets the molding of the wall.
It was a 2-minute change, that I was happy to make.
Next Up, I was assigned 2 more backgrounds, both meant to be considered future date spots, but for the scope of the game demo, they were used as out-of-office areas where the main character would run into her clients when off the clock.
The Cafe was meant to be something closer to a juice bar, I thought about it more like a Jamba Juice fused with one of those snack bars from a gym. I was given a couple of stricter references for this one; the general design of the BG, the angle, and the color scheme. I was also asked to add a display case for snacks. Everything else was left up to me, in the original reference, there was a wall that cut off the back of this scene and it was just a plain white wall. The perspective was weird because of that wall, so I instead decided to build a lounge area. I tried to remember the atmospheric perspective for how this picture was taken so that the background of this scene was lighter overall. I added more shadow upfront as well.
The 3rd background was requested to be a Diner/Bistro kind of area. They wanted some industrial structure to the building like these thick white beams on the ceiling and family booth seating. This was actually the 2nd one that I finished, but it's sketch was finished after the Cafe.
When it was originally assigned to me, I had trouble with the color scheme because they hadn't mentioned a bistro. They said a diner, and then sent some inspo pics of something like a fast-sitdown place, closer to an iHop or Denny's.
I communicated my problems once the sketch was mostly finished, and the group leader clarified that they wanted something closer to a Marie Calendar's, and then said "Bistro," it was much easier to find a reference from the same city and state the game takes place, and I swiftly found a good color palette.
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It was at this moment that I noticed a pattern in terms of color. Everything had a blue and orange makeup to it. I prefer split complimentary usually, but from this point, I hoped I'd get to do something outdoors, like a park or lake so that I could do some more blue and green combinations. I personally don't enjoy orange as a color too much, so I was a little tired at this point of this muted color theme for these two date backgrounds. I wanted to do something brighter. I did enquire with my group leader about if there would be any of those kinds of locations, and it seemed that the writers wouldn't get that far before the deadline.
Finally, we arrive at the last BG. The Hallway.
This background was a personal victory for me. Although I can see changes I can make to make the perspective better, for the time constraints I had to finish it, I'm proud that I managed to fit as much detail as I did. I feel like I really powered through the nights I spent on this monster.
The reason I speak of it this way is because I have a personal painting that I haven't started beyond the sketch. The main subject is a vending machine, and I thought it wouldn't be hard to do until I got to the inside of the vending machine. The perspective of items, the metal coils, when to make things fade, what it looks like empty, it's all been so intimidating to me.
Getting to tackle this subject again, I was nervous and careful. I learned a lot about how to go about my painting though, I realized I've been drastically overthinking it, and not thinking enough about how many products can actually fit in it.
I also learned a lot about Procreate and how to more efficiently work using it. I think this is my favorite of the whole bunch.
-This page is still currently in development and is updated after every finished project-