Pre-Production

To start off pre-production, I want to quickly go back and address the protagonist Stenca's design for this game. It was one of the first things I thought about when considering an overhaul, as I believe that there's work to be done to make her design the best it can be.

Personally, I believe that at it's core, the design is satisfactory. I don't want to change it too much. I'll be mostly working on the shape, refining her design to fit the tone of the game as well as taking into account some of the newer influences and research.

Her original design was created in 2022. It didn't have many outright inspirations or references, and at its core, she was simply supposed to resemble a humanized paintbrush, as this diagram below shows.

I don't have many issues with this direction. I think it's a clever and fun way to communicate her role as an artist, and it makes for a cute design. This is why I don't really wish to totally overhaul her design. I feel like doing anything too different might end up overcomplicating things, and this direction definitely has potential. Opening up Paint, I quickly sketched her 2022 design and wrote down my aim.

Following some research and considering certain thematic similarities with games such as Kirby: Canvas Curse, I've found the Kirby franchise might work as a good influence for this kind of game. Cute Fantasy with colourful environments and cast, aimed towards primarily young people first, prioritising fun over difficulty. The first thing that came to mind was a certain character from the series, Adeleine, who, similarly to Stenca, is a young artist girl who is said to not originate from the game's primary setting.

Considering this design, I immediately had a pretty vivid idea for where I wanted to take this. Adeleine's design is great. She's simple, cute, fits into the world and matches the tone and style. Her design also communicates her upbeat, perhaps nonconfrontational, personality as well as her role as an artist very well.

Her silhouette, which I broke down (albeit not in as much detail) as shown below, is quite standard for a cartoony character like her. Her design is very round, heavily comprised of rounded and circular shapes. Beyond generally just fitting into the world, this alone really compliments her character, giving her a cute, friendly, almost child-like appearance along with her cartoony and exaggerated proportions, with an appeal similar to the Japanese "Chibi" style. Her design is free of clutter. There's not much going on, making her easy to depict and easy on the eyes, unintimidating, and also, again, just helping her to fit into the style of the game. This also keeps her silhouette very simple and streamlined.

With this in mind, I broke down Stenca's 2022 design silhouette and quickly wrote down some notes for what I wanted to change. Much like Adeleine's design breakdown, this is shown in the image below, but I'll write about this in more detail now.

Generally, Stenca's design right now is very boxy and sharp. Though there's some roundness to her design, it isn't given much emphasis. Certain parts are cluttered or unclear, with some elements such as the scarf's tail seeming strange and out-of-place especially. Beyond just her roundness not being given a lot of emphasis, many elements are clumped together as well, making her look like a nondescript, only vaguely humanoid blob. The design in particular doesn't do enough to portray her personality and subtleties. She seems more skittish and messy, which is somewhat part of her personality but is certainly not at the forefront and should be shown through her actions rather than very dominantly through her design. Even in her 2022 spritework, her animations were rather generic and didn't compliment her character enough.

So it was settled. I got to work on quickly putting together a design iteration. Streamlining and cleaning up her silhouette especially, making her rounder and more cartoony with more distinct proportions, generally taking notes from Adeleine's design and what I've gathered.

This is what I ended up with.

Like I said, I made sure not to change the design too much, and I focused on improving the shape and silhouette. This already looks a lot better. I feel it's more reflective of a design I might make today. I went over and listed some things I changed in the Paint canvas, as well as my thought processes. I feel it goes over it well enough, so I won't go too much further into detail.

I think this kind of design change encapsulates my aim with this project pretty well. It's an overhaul of a concept I made for an assignment back in my first year. It shows a lot of growth in my development and artistic process. It's done with a lot more intent and considers many different factors. This iteration is a lot more fitting for a game like this. It's cute, cartoony, friendly-looking, clean, more appealing to the younger audience I'm trying to cater to, and it focuses more on the positives of her personality rather than making her look like a scraggly, skittish, hyper-alert animal. I'm quite happy with it. It'll continue to evolve and find a more concrete and final shape with how I choose to depict it later on.

Here's the full canvas.

I did consider her palette, but there isn't much to say there. I didn't change it at all, simply softened one of the colours so it wouldn't look too out of place. The original sprite featured very bright and vibrant colours, but I'm planning to make them softer and more pastel. Next, I'll be going over her animations and then following that up with level concept art.

With the new iteration of the main character Stenca's design finished, It was time to plan out how her spritesheet and animations would look.

Typically, when taking on a project like this, I like to sketch out and put together a concept sheet, visualising a character's animations, usually including rough frame counts and brief written descriptors of little details and how the animation plays out beyond the sketch itself. I did this with the 2022 version of this game, with my first year's FMP, and more recently with my Unit 10. To me, it feels only natural and a little basic. I'm sure this is practiced somewhat regularly, but I haven't seen much of it. I believe I first picked up this habit when looking at concept art for the 2018 release of Toby Fox's DELTARUNE, which I'll attach below.

Toby Fox as a developer and his games were a big part of why I took on game development, and so it's unsurprising I'd pick up that habit from the development of one of those games. I'd probably have eventually trial-and-error'd my way into adopting these practices on my own had I not taken from this, but I'm glad I picked it up as quick as I did. That's beside the point.

Going into this, a primary aim of mine is to emphasize her personality through her animation as much as possible. Her 2022 animations were often quite generic, inexpressive, and didn't do enough to communicate her personality and character. This was only made worse by her design itself, which I've voiced my issues on in the redesign section. Since then, I've grown a lot as an artist and designer. I've come to put a lot more importance on making sure a character is properly represented. I want to achieve this aim through both subtle and not subtle means, and I already have a few ideas on how I'll go about this.

Obviously, the first one I'm doing is her walk cycle. I recall back in my first year of Level 3, we had gone into depth on walk cycles. How they're broken down in animation, how they can be used to express the character's personality, etc. To keep the sheet simple, I'll only be drawing the major contact and pass poses, as are shown on this image.

 I don't struggle much with walk cycles, especially after we went over them.

My idea for her walk cycle is that it would be mostly generic. Simple, modest. I don't want to do too much as walking is a very simple act and it'll be in quite low resolution and it could end up looking too distracting, not flowing well, etc. However, I'll be adding a subtle sway to her arms as she moves. Sort of slack. I believe this'll help give her a slight air of whimsy, cuteness, or clueless vulnerability, maybe sort of childish and silly. I believe in a way that the overall generic aspect of the walk will, in a way, also help to communicate her character. Make her feel more like a normal girl, rather than someone confident, grand, and fit for adventure.

As for the running animation, I can be less subtle with her characterisation. Compared to just walking, running is a more extreme action. Even if the walk cycle is mostly regular, the run cycle can be a good opportunity to show off a character's personality. For that, I'll be going into a more lengthy tangent.

If you look at some of the biggest platformer characters out there, a lot of them have quite unique run cycles. In rare cases, mostly characters such as Sonic, the way they run is a big, well known, recognizable aspect of their character.

For example, I'll be looking into Mario, Sonic and Wario.

Mario's run cycle can change between games. Sometimes, he has a more generic, yet confident run. Sometimes, it's dependent, and he'll switch between animations depending on how fast he's running. In a lot of games, at top speed, he's shown to run in a very specific way.

At top speed, Mario will often run around with his arms stretched out like this. Airplane arms. Sometimes, his fists will be balled up, sometimes, he'll have his hands open and flat. Sometimes, he'll be leaning forward, showing concentration and confidence especially in his expression, and sometimes, he'll be leaning back, as if blown back by his own speed.

Either way, this run I believe helps to emphasize his happy-go-lucky, whimsical, fun nature, with an exaggerated and cartoony posture. In fact, this particular way of running is known for its use in certain anime, especially older anime, to depict whimsical characters in a good mood, and sometimes children, utilising its cute factor. This is likely why Nintendo used this.

While it primarily helps to convey his whimsical and happy-go-lucky nature, when depicted with him leaning forward in a concentrated expression, it helps to dually convey his conviction, confidence, and experience, the fact that he's not all games. That his adventures and goals are serious, he's taking this serious, and he won't let down his guard. Overall, this does a great job at portraying both facets of his personality.

Sonic's run cycle has changed a few times over the years, but at its core, they are all recognizable. I'll be going over the more classic 2D depictions. Sonic is all about speed and running, and so of course, there has to be emphasis and recognizability in the way he runs. He also had a lot of personality, and was known for well they depicted this from just his first entry.

In the classic 2D platformer games, Sonic was mostly depicted with the typical two stages of animation. In Sonic CD, however, Sonic had three stages, so I'll be going over that. These consist of a confident stride, running, and then the final stage, at his absolute highest speed, the figure-eight run, known as the "super peel out". This image shows the second and final stage.

The typical running stage is recognisable in and of itself. He's confident concentrated, leaning forward, arms tucked in as his legs move at such a speed they blur in a sort of loop. A pretty cartoony depiction of high-speed running, and I've seen it in some places outside of Sonic, but it's never as recognizable. There are two alternate stages in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 which ended up unused graphics that depict a slightly cartoonier version of this stage, and a slightly more advanced looking stage where he leans further forward, featuring the same extra cartooniness as the last.

The figure-eight run, or the super peel out, is probably the most recognizable. In this stage, he's leaning forward, arms stretched out behind him in an aerodynamic, cooler rather than cute variant of the previously mentioned airplane arms, seen in and widely known for their appearance in anime like Naruto, to portray extreme speeds and agility. His legs are moving fast enough to blur into a figure-eight shape, an evolution to his normal running stage, that shows he's going above and beyond. His expression shows focus, concentration, also aided by his posture, but there's almost an air of showing-off to it, tapping into his radical appeal and showing that beyond his short-temper and unbreakable conviction shown in a lot of other animations, he's often a braggart. Everything about this animation works to convey his incredible speed as well as his cool, confident, cocky, yet "get it done" personality.

In modern video game renditions of his character, though the figure-eight legs are often lost, this pose has remained a staple of his character. Running with his arms stretched back, leaning forward in general has become synonymous with Sonic, and certain non video game renditions still depict him with that figure-eight leg shape, which shows that part of the run cycle hasn't been entirely lost with time and has too become associated with him.

Sonic and Mario's max speed running animations, in a way, are somewhat similar. In the sense that they're both often depicted leaned forward, concentrated, with their arms stretched out in some way. But they're still very different animations, and both convey their respective personalities and strengths beyond just that basic description. Wario, on the other hand, is quite different. Specifically, I'll be talking about his signature "Dash Attack" run cycle.

As opposed to Mario and Sonic, which are fundamentally heroic, selfless characters, Wario is horrible, ugly, greedy, crude, hot-tempered, and selfish. He's stumpy, yet wide and imposing, with a broad and stocky body type that's not only fat but also muscle. He's was originally an antagonist, but there are many games where he plays the role of the protagonist, the main character, and of course, none of those traits change.

With that aside, he's commonly known for his signature move, the "Dash Attack", as previously mentioned. Also more accurately named, the "Shoulder Barge". This is sometimes shown as a tackle, but it's also often shown as a sort of charge.

This run-cycle is much different from the last ones I went over. In this animation, Wario is shown charging at full speed with his strong, muscular arm flexed in front of him, using his powerful shoulder to plough through and destroy everything in his path, whether that be enemies or walls. His arm is shown to shield him, a sort of defensive and offensive position as he not only destroys everything in his way, but prevents any incoming harm. His legs are sometimes shown in a more traditional running motion, but as seen in the 6th example in the image above, they can also be depicted in a more exaggerated, cartoony blur motion, along with a more exaggerated posture overall.

 There's a lot of confidence in this animation, but most importantly, power. There's a lot of power, aggression, and very little vulnerability. Unlike the others, which while confident, still leave themselves vulnerable to harm and danger. It's akin to a charging American Football player. This kind of animation fits Wario's cruder, stronger, hot-tempered, headstrong, less heroic character. He's a big, strong, stocky man that cares less about anything but himself or his own goals, and he'll break through anything that stops him like it's nothing and display his power and dominance while he's at it.

While this may have been a very lengthy breakdown for a process that'll be very straight forward and simple, it's important to highlight how a running animation can highlight a character's personality, their strengths, in a much more complex way than a walk cycle. Especially in the case of cartoon characters, where exaggeration is commonplace and encouraged. Personally, for me, I found looking into this quite interesting, as it's not something I've really thought about in detail like this before.

For Stenca's run-cycle, I want to convey the messier, more skittish, panicky, unconfident aspects of her personality which had plagued her old design, as I spoke about earlier. She's inexperienced, being just a regular girl, and on top of that, she's not particularly outgoing or adventurous like Mario or Sonic. I imagine her to be quite shy at times and prone to panic and self doubt, someone who doesn't really get very physical either. She's the opposite of a platformer hero, or even antihero like Wario, and she was just sort of thrown into action with maybe one or two extra powers. 

My first idea was to depict this with a cute, frantic run-cycle, that could read as a burst of reckless courage, but it's mostly just panic. Her face would help to show this with a cute, scrunched up, frantic expression. I also wanted her arms slack, falling behind. It's clear to me from my previous observations that the motion of the arms in a run-cycle can make all the difference, and I believe simply having her arms slack helps to convey her inexperience and lack of confidence, unable to so much as move her arms, just letting them be blown back. You could also see it as a way to convey how unathletic she is, as when paired with everything else, it can sort of also create the impression that she's overexerting herself already and is just going as far as her legs can take her, with no energy to move her arms or put any extra work into it. It feels like a natural evolution from the subtle sway in her walking animation, too.

I put that to paper. Simple. Pretty satisfied with it. It's already a lot better than what I had last time, and I feel it'll flow a lot better overall when sprited.

From here, it's all pretty simple stuff. For her jump animation, I just wanted something simple, going into it with a similar mentality to the walk. If I overcomplicated it, it could end up weird and jarring and overdone. It's also important to keep in mind when taking on more common animations that she is just supposed to be a normal girl. Barely average, at that. Not a confident, adventurous, reliable, capable, heroic man like Mario or a super-fast, freedom-fighting, humanoid, environmentalist vigilante hedgehog like Sonic, just some random, below average, unathletic, meek young girl from a grounded world who just got thrown into action. It's important to me that there's a sense of normality and realism in at least some of her animations.

For the double jump animation, though, I wanted something less traditional since it's not something she usually does or was even physically able to do before she entered this world of her paintings. I wanted to get across the idea that she was using this big, magic paintbrush she was given to thrust herself upwards, but I don't want it to look too visually complex, so it'd be shown as a simple spinning animation a la Sonic's jump.

Her hurt animation was nothing special either. Nothing to say here. I did end up utilizing the whole "scarf tail can turn jagged and zigzaggy or wavy depending on what she's doing or her current emotion" thing that I noted down in her concept art. Considered giving her a round cartoony teardrop extending from her glasses, and I might still do that in the actual sprite.

Now for her PAINT MODE animations, I decided to portray a more whimsical Stenca. She's wielding this magic paintbrush that can alter the world around her, and looking past the absurdity of everything, she's kind of having fun. I imagine she feels like a silly and cute cartoon character doing it, which is ironic because to the player, that's exactly what she is. Anyway, all of that means more exaggerated movements, sort of setting aside the fact she is just a normal girl, in place of acting more like the fun, animated character that a protagonist of a platformer like this would be. There's nothing normal about holding this comically giant paintbrush and swinging it around, and so there's no reason to pretend like there is.

And that's about it for this. Overall, from these sketches alone, I feel these animations are already far better than her 2022 ones. They flow better, they're far more expressive, getting across different facets of her personality and character like her overall normality, her cluelessness, vulnerability, lack of confidence, inexperience, traces of childishness, and also her whimsy, joy, and playfulness, in a pretty balanced way. They're made with a lot more thought and intent. Again, I particularly liked looking into and analysing run-cycles. It helped me with with properly characterising her, seeing what works, what I can do to communicate her character and mentality properly, and I feel it'll help me in my future work too. Here's the full canvas. Next time, I plan to get into UI concept and the level's design.

Production's already been going for a bit, and it's high time I start thinking on the level's visual design. I'll try to make this short, since I need to get this part out of the way so I meet my production targets for this week.

To preface this, this is basically a more extreme version of the protagonist design touch up I did. I'm making this with the 2022 version of the level's design in mind, but I'm trying to go into it with a sort of fresh perspective. The basic idea is that I'm wanting to go for the typical platformer beginner setting.

Think Mario, Sonic, Kirby, all these iconic platformer franchises. One thing they all share in common is starting off most of their platform games in some variation of a bright, sunny field. Green grass, blue sky, sun shining, you get the picture. 

It's a pretty common trope, and it works out because that kind of scene is just really BASIC.

It's a simple visage of the most common, everyday form natural environment. That's it. They start you off by throwing you into the most familiar, generic outdoors setting. They don't intimidate you or overwhelm you with some strange or unfamiliar location, just a grassy, usually hilly or mountainous meadow on a pleasant day. It's perfect for first levels in games like these. Usually, first levels will serve as tutorial levels, so it's important that you get them adjusted into the world through other means rather than the level layout. It's insanely normal, and that's all you need.

It's also flexible because of that normality. It's essentially a canvas. It's easy to convey a tone or a style through different design elements when all you've got is a field as a base. If you want to convey a cute and whimsical sort of vibe, just slap some cute and whimsical design features onto the field base and it'll fit right in.

In my case, I'm taking inspiration from Sonic CD's Palmtree Panic zone. I imagine my level to look like your typical, sunny, cartoony field, but with strange, out of place, and sort of abstract elements slapped onto it. Little oddities in the landscape. Things like that.

I quickly put together a little mood board.

I want to establish a star or astrology theming in the level, and I also want to have a sort of strange mix of almost futuristic elements and more ancient roman architecture kind of structures. That kind of juxtaposition will help to sell the abstract, otherworldly, goofy weirdness I'm trying to convey with this level.

I started sketching out some basic landmarks. The palmtree's leaves I imagine would resemble the tail of a shooting star symbol, as they close in on a star shaped fruit in the middle. The structure on the right is a weird sort of light post. I had it in the original version, but I never gave much thought to what it's actually supposed to be. Light post sounds right,  though.

I expanded the sketch a little bit, adding a weird sort of plant and some mountains in the background which kind of make the sketch a little incomprehensible.

Once this was out of the way, I wanted to do a colour test. Mainly for the background. Backgrounds have never been my forte, and this is my opportunity to finally try taking a proper one on. I want to get this absolutely right the first time.

This level is supposed to be an old acrylic painting that the protagonist, Stenca, started but never finished. Just a weird, surreal, vibrant, acryllic landscape painting. To get that feeling right, I threw together another moodboard.

There's a certain feel that acryllic paintings give off. I really want to match that. Particularly, I really like the look of the one in the top center and the one in the top left, so I'm looking at those especially.

The first colour test I did didn't go anywhere. It was immediately dropped. The browns looked off.

I decided to go with something closer to blue or a bluish purple to match the sky. It felt right, and the paintings I pulled as reference do seem to do that, and immediately, it was looking much better. I added some extra detailing to it and experimented with some greens for a sort of forest layer at the bottom.

This was pretty much the direction I stuck with going forward. I added some extra details, including a splodgy sky referencing the painting on the top left especially.

And then I cleaned it up just a little bit more.

This was gonna be final, but after sketching out another little colour test to see how the foreground would look against the background, I decided to experiment a little out of curiosity, using Aseprite's hue shifting and colour wheel features to mess around with the colours.

I was a little stuck. The result of the experimentation looked honestly pretty good, which I suppose was the aim as I went because I already wasn't too 100% sure about the base background colours, but I was indecisive and wasn't sure which one was the best pick.

I consulted some of my friends and the consensus seems to be that the first one, being the experiment, works better overall. The colours make the background pop less. While I'm definitely going for a brighter, sort of saturated feel for the level, it's definitely worth making sure that the background doesn't stick out too much, as it might end up intrusive, distracting, and blending in with the foreground.

So, it was decided. This was pretty much final. I'll likely tinker with the colours again once I get to actually spriting this background, but this is the closest to final there is.

Testing how different level elements might look against this background definitely also reinforced it being the better colour option.

With that out of the way, I moved on to quickly sketching out some HUD elements.

I put together a quick and lazy mockup just to set the scene. After checking out some of the aesthetics for the games suggested to me during research, I have a very specific idea for how I want to execute the new HUD designs.

For the HUD, I want to get a more sort of handmade feel to it. Arts-and-crafty, like they're more than just icons on a screen. For the HP display, I'm imagining it to look like 3 heart shaped splodged of paint on a palette, which then become smudged when the player takes damage. For the big coin display, I imagine something more sticker esque. I didn't draw anything for the coins, score, or time display since I thought they were pretty basic and easy to grasp. They'd get a similar theming, though.

For the Paint Mode UI, I wanted to achieve a similar effect to the regular HUD but on a grander scale. After survey responses gave me some ideas on how I could rework the Paint Mode mechanic a little bit, particularly material selection, I immediately pictured the UI design taking on the appearance of a huge palette, with little slots in it signifying the options and the selectable materials.

From the sketch alone, I'm pretty excited to sprite this. I hope I can do it justice.

Finally, I just wanted to quickly sketch out this boss design since I had the spontaneous idea. This world's main enemy is themed around cats, so for the boss design, I wanted to take that a step further and make it a lion with an almost sun shaped mane to fit with the astrology theming.

Though I obviously won't be able to use this boss design in the actual final product, it's likely I'll use his face as a visual motif throughout the level. I did something similar back in 2022.

Again, this one was a little bit more rushed, since I need to get back to work as soon as possible, but hopefully I got my thoughts across well enough.