hello! this is the start of my third year, final major project blog! where I will be documenting the process of working on this all important final university project.
Week 1
prior to starting third year in games art, I was taking part on a DPS (diploma in professional studies) year. during that year I worked on several projects, both related to my digital art specialism and completely different to thing I have worked on before. below is the presentation that displays all of my DPS work. I wanted to talk about DPS here in this FMP blog as it was a really significant experience for me, and I was able to develop my skills in art and other aspects that will be helping me through this FMP year.
before our first class in year 3, we were asked to create a short presentation containing the three ideas we have for out FMP, along with our summer work. for summer work I just showed some personal fan art drawings that I had worked on and one project from DPS that I was working on during the summer.
my three project ideas were: a short 2D visual novel, a series of 2D loading screens featuring splash art and a 2D character art book. I knew that I wanted to go with a horror theme and planned this with all of these ideas.
I decided to go with making the visual novel idea, as this was my main idea and I was very excited at the id of making a visual novel, as I have wanted to or a long time. this would include me making assets like characters, backgrounds and UI/GUI features. I carried on generating ideas for this and adding them to my notes.
so by the end of the first week I was sure I wanted to create a 2D visual novel for my FMP, I was also sure I wanted it to be of a horror theme. the rest was just continuing on my general ideas generation and inspirations for my project. this was a great start to my final year at uni! and I was enjoying going back to class again after having DPS and not attending my regular games art classes. also being given the freedom to create anything that I want for my final project was super excited and helped to motivate me!!
I also started my FMP pinterest board at this time to start gathering ideas and references for my project! I made a few sections within the board, focusing on game/ visual novel inspirations, outfit ideas for my characters and background ideas.
Week 2
this week began with handing in a first draft of our project idea to our tutor to let him know the brief outline and scope. so I took some time to think more about my idea, I already knew the type of game I was going to make (visual novel). I am really inspired by other visual novel games, as I am a big fan of the genre, so I knew what kind of direction to go and what I am aiming for for the end product.
I had to mainly think about the back story and inspiration of my game. I decided I wanted to create a psychological thriller story and include a mental health theme with a character with a split personality. I had recently rewatched some favourite movies of mine: black swan, perfect blue and girl interrupted. all these movies focus on female mental health and mental illness, which ended up inspiring me toward the idea that I came up with.
Next I created this mind map of ideas, working off the notes that I showed in the last week post plus my developing horror visual novel concept idea.
following my idea for a mental health theme and split personality character I developed the narrative story. I decided that I wanted the story to follow a character in a high-stress environment that causes a mental break, leading to a split personality. I chose to focus on a medical setting, where the characters
are nurses working at a hospital. I was also led here by the idea of creating nurse character designs, which seemed exciting and a good chance to explore a medical horror theme, which I haven’t done before.
after this, I wrote some further notes about the scope of the project as I was going to dicuss it with my tutor. this is only a rough idea of the assets that I need to make, but I know that I want create 3 main characters for my game, with one of them having 2 versions as she has the split personality.
I quickly realised that creating a visual novel game from scartch means taking on a lot of work, but this honestly motivated me more as I know the outcome will be so worth it. I will have to create multiple assets: characters, backgrounds, UI, start and end screens, I will also have to use a software to create the game and use coding within that.
I also added a few things that I discussed with my tutor in my notes here, he mentioned that working on expressions and outfits of the characters is very important. he also asked if I was going to include voice acting, which I hadnt really thought of yet, but it seems like a cool possibility – its not time to think about the sound of my game just yet though haha!
Week 3
I started drawing the first drafts and ideas for my main character and gave her a name – Lilith. This is the character that will have a split personality in my games story. I’m not completely set on all of my characters looks and personalities yet, but I knew I wanted Lilith to have a timid personality and tried to make her appearance reflect that, as her ‘other personality’ would have a different, more assertive look. So I tried to experimiment with how this might look. As well as experiment with how they may look ‘fused’ together. since I am making a horror visual novel, I want to add some element of visual horror through some body horror aspects. So I thought it would be cool and visually interesting to also have a scary looking sprite, this is also pretty exciting for me as I have drawn some body horror pieces in the past and really enjoyed it.
I also tried to experiment with her facial expressions. As visual novels are a medium that mostly relies on static images to convey story and emotion, I wanted the facial expressions to show her state of mind and be quite exaggerated to really get the point across.
Week 4
This week I started the first designs and ideas for my other characters in the visual novel. I want to have at least 3 main characters that are all nurses working at the hospital together, and possibly a fourth character that is the male hospital director of which some conflict comes from between the main 3 characters.
These are the basic ideas for my characters, Lilith is the main character and the game will be based around her mental state and her interactions with the other characters.
And below are ideas for my secondary characters Eve and Naomi. They have opposite personalities of stern and friendly, whereas Lilith is quite a neutral personality until her mental break in the story. Since my art style often features quite similar faces, I wanted to make sure to add aspects to the characters that makes them stand out from eachother – like the plaster on the face, freckles or glasses. i also mostly experimented with different hair style designs. Quite sharp and brutal looking for Eve – fitting her persoanlity, and fluffy, bouncy curls for Naomi that are cute looking.
For more inspiration, I created a section on my pinterest board for hair style designs.
Week 5
This week I started ideas for outfit/ uniform designs for the characters. I was inspired by various images I found on pinterest of interesting looking nurse and hospital uniforms, as well as nurses from other games/ media and drawings. A lot of the images were of J-fashion outfits and I really liked these as my project does have Japanese and anime influences since I am primarily inspired by Japanese visual novels that I have played and enjoyed. I tried a lot of different outfit designs and I wanted to make sure the outfits also fit the characters personalities.
Here are my outfit inspirations collated from pinterest into a pureref board.
