Still Fighting

Yeah, okay, I have been doing stuff, it's just been largely on the written and boring diagrams side of things.
The hardest part of making a game of this kind is that the characters are all fairly ordinary human beings. It's not all fantastical . This is definitely a lot harder than designing a Fantasy game.
Keeping things quite loose for these character bio images. Fits with the mature and down to earth feel of the game. The hardest is proving to be the character Julia, a faded celebrity in her mid-late 30's. It's hard to capture a sense of somebody who is very glamorous and pretty but with an edge of faded glory and desperation. It's not a character I've ever really had to depict before.

Black and White

Some bits and bobs. portraits of characters, The Captain and Keisuke. Not based on photographs. I wanted to construct faces from scratch rather than just using photos. Tutorials like these are very handy for stuff like this:
http://cedarseed.deviantart.com/art/Guide-to-Human-Types-part-1-32046017
http://cedarseed.deviantart.com/art/Guide-to-Human-Types-part-2-33220929
http://cedarseed.deviantart.com/art/Guide-to-Human-Types-part-3-34877428
Keisuke was a lot easier to draw for me. I live and grew up in an area with very little ethnic diversity, but I did live in Japan for a year, so I'm more used to the typical details of a Japanese face than an Afro Caribbean one!

And yeah, I just spent a couple of weeks teaching myself how to paint more realistic style faces. My comic line art style just doesn't feel right for this game, plus I don't particularly like digital painting with heavily stylised faces (unless the painting is purely for colour or shade, it kept simple and used in conjunction with line art, like the work of manga artist Nana Li, where it looks awesome). I think it's fortunate in a situation like this, that despite drawing manga style, I tend to spend a lot of time studying real anatomy, and tend to stick to naturalistic proportions. If that weren't the case, it would have been much more difficult to make the transition!

The room isn't as good because...well, I am not naturally very good at things like that. I've given it a go, but really I find inorganic and geometric things very difficult. The more organic elements there are in a room, the easier I find it generally, so a ramshackle cottage would be much easier than a minimalist space ship cabin.

Paragon

This sure is a fast way to make art! This only took about 30 mins. Starting to understand why it's used for concept work so much, as an atmospheric and fairly finished full colour image can be created remarkably quickly. While it is tricky because I've just started learning, I'd say this is actually a lot easier than manga. Manga is deceptively hard, as the simplicity and clean lines are far less forgiving than painting, and you can't always just chip away at something until it looks fine, particularly with physical rather than digital inking. I don't know why they think we're hacks. -_-;

I think I'll use Digital painting for the mock screenshots in the FPT project. It's a lot faster way to make a finished looking image than line art and inking and stuff. I think monotone painting will work really well for a nice noir-ish feel anyway!

Tatatataa taa taa tatataaaa!

Look, I know that the subject matter is not related to the project, being a picture of Cloud from FF7, but I'm very pleased with my progress in Digital painting today.
It's so useful having a lot of artists as friends at times like this. Since saying I wanted to learn, I've been given a huge amount of advice, resources and links to tutorials!

I feel a lot more confident about using digital painting for this project now I've discovered it's not actually all that hard to learn.

Oh snap

Okay, this whole 'not doing any digital painting' would be a lot easier if I wasn't so obsessive.

I was told by a few people that I should start in black and white. I also figured that starting with rooms wasn't a great idea seeing as I'm considerably better at organic stuff than inorganic.
This was done using a rough pencil sketch from my sketchbook. Obviously it's not an ideal sketch to use, as it was drawn with stylised proportions. Personally I'm not a huge fan of painterly styles applied to manga proportions, as the more realistic lighting and texturing combined with unrealistic proportions creates a strange 'uncanny valley' effect. My manga style doesn't deviate hugely from real proportions, but her head looks a little too big (unless she's 5'1", of course, my head:body ratio is about the same as hers, 1:6.5), and her eyes I had to paint smaller than I'd drawn them, they looked freaky hahaha! I used the sketch mainly just because this was purely a quick technical exercise.
It's not perfect. The contrast isn't confident for a start, and the light direction isn't distinct enough. Starting in monochrome is a good start though, and I didn't use brush opacity this time, and was more confident and free flowing.

Hmmm...perhaps I should give digital painting the screens a shot...

Down to business

Okay, I think I should leave off digital painting for this project and keep it as something to practice in my spare time. It seems like something that takes a long while to learn and experimenting with a completely new medium I've barely used when doing a new project probably isn't the best idea. I may try to work any good digital paints I DO manage into the project, but I'm going to stick with what I'm good at for bashing through the work.

The form of the project will be a mock 'Let's Play'. 'Let's Play' is a concept I really like, as it's basically a bunch of screenshots or a video with a commentary, either written or spoken depending on the format which takes you through a playthrough of a game. Some are humorous, mocking bad or strange game elements, making humorous asides or playing the game in an eccentric way on purpose, others are serious and straightforward. You can find loads of them here:
http://www.letsplayarchive.com/
I love the concept of LP, because sometimes I have limited time or don't have the console or the game never came out here, or it's just too difficult or a horror game (as I have mentioned before I am a complete wuss and lose all playing skill and control when scared so can't play horror games, but like to watch others play them!), but I really want to know what happens in the game and the storyline. Some of them, like the 'Knights of the Old Republic 2' LP even give storyline commentary, pointing things out, as well as including reconstructions of content cut from the game, and showing conversations which are hard to get due to requiring high empathy with certain characters.
I suppose as a person, I enjoy watching others play games just as much, sometimes more than I like to play them myself. My brother tends to call me a 'walking instruction manual' since I tend to learn every aspect surrounding a game, and always know what to do, I'm just not great at playing them. Sometimes you notice game design aspects more when watching a game than playing it anyway, because you don't have to concentrate and can look around from a more objective perspective.

I'll be making the screenshot type, but of course, the screenshots will be fake, like a storyboard with descriptions. This will hopefully give the reader a good idea of what a playthrough of the game would be like. How it would play, what sort of thing would happen etc. It plays to my strong areas as a comic artist, and illustrates the game concept, as it's a subtle game involving reading clues and picking up information. Simply saying the game is like this wouldn't quite get across the nuances.
I think I'll do the whole thing in black and white. It'll save time, print nicely and I think look quite atmospheric. The game itself wouldn't be in black and white, but I think I'd like to go for a very sparse aesthetic. I loved the minimalist approach of 'Radical Dreamers' a very obscure sequel to Chrono Trigger made for the Satellaview. You can download this game and a translation from Japanese for a snes emulator, and I recommend it. It's a text adventure with very minimalist graphics and music (the music is still awesome though, it's Mitsueda), which after the first play through, can be played multiple times for radically different story tangents, many comic, some sweet and one freaking scary!

The LP I'm making will illustrate a possible run. It's not a perfect run. The player works out the identity of the killer and a rough idea of how it was done, but doesn't get a lot of evidence. They visit every character though, to give a feel for the game as a whole.

Hmmm

I think I need more practice. This digital painting melarky doesn't come naturally to a dyed-in-the-wool line artist like me. These are not very good hahahahaha!