In these weeks leading up to the E1 submission I need to get much more organised that I am and make sure I have a secure strcuture for my FMP. My tutor strongly advised everyone to make a gantt chart to keep a fixed schedule for our project. I also made an asset list, although I am still not 100% sure on everything I want to include in my VN – as the story is not fully realised yet, but I made a list of what I should be aiming for here. I made these both in excel.
My tutor also asked us all to complete a SWOT analysis of our project on this form, to identify everything that could happen with the project.
I stated that I am happy to be creating a character design project with so much creative freedom and I have wanted to create my own visual novel for some years now and had created some concepts for them before, so I am glad to be doing this now. I am also excited to have something high quality showing my specialism to put on my professional portfolio in the future. I am worried about time management of completing my tasks, especially as this is a fully self-structured project. Also about the fact of having to learn a new skill and software of coding in Renpy, however I know that there are numerous online tutorials explaining the program.
I made some notes when speaking to my tutor about my project and he gave me some advise – mostly about how important the proof of concept is for my E1 submission. He advised to study some art styles and make sure that my art style for the project is fully realised and cohesive – for the style, line art and rendering styles. Visual storytelling is also very important here as I will be using the static character and background drawings to tell the story as well as the dialogue in the game.
He also advised me to not rely on copious amounts of blood to create horror and to think of other ways to convey this in my art.
Exhibition visits:
Before E1, another classmate and I visited 2 exhibitons to gather somme primary research and inspirations. The Marie antionette fashion exhibition and one for the new Frankenstein movie.
I was inspired by the vintage looking garments here and the lace and embelishments were really beautiful. I was already aiming for an elegant/ lolital style of nurse outfits for my designs, and this exhibition gave me more ideas for lace and extra details.
The Frankenstein exhibiton was particularly inspiring for me as it is also a medical horror story, and featured lovely garments, as well as gorey sculptures and concept art from the planning of the movie. I picked up a lot of ideas here for my project, like the design of my body horror ‘monster’ and extra potential details for my garments.
Preparation for E1:
I made a little checklist for what I have to have prepared to go in my E1 pdf.
Firstly, I worked on my proof of concept as this is important to help me with the cohesive art style of the project. I was particularly focused on the Atlus art style, including games like the persona series and catherine. For the final outcome of my characters I want to include a thin line art and simple cel shading – as per the Persona style.
Next I began finalising the designs of my three characters. This included putting hair and outfits together from my thumbnails and improving on some aspects of those designs. I decided on the poses for the characters, which reflect their personalities and designed their outfits with reference from my initial thumbnails with some tweaks.
Then I experimented with some colour trials. I also wanted to match the colours of their clothes to their personalities, but I was more unsure on Liliths colour scheme as she has less of a stereotypical personality type than the other two characters.
I’m still not completely sure on what colour scheme I want to go for for each of the characters, but it is definitely helpful to have a lot of options for a reference in the future.
I have placed a lot less focus on the background design and what that will look like completely, so I made a new moodboard of images from pinterest on pureref, out of ideas for the background. Taking inspiration from real hospital settings and those from other games. I looked at horror backgrounds too, as I wanted to first create a normal hospital background and have it change according to Liliths mental state – to something more scary.
I also experimented with some filters over the backgrounds to see what would work best in the game, with characters standing in front of it.
I was apprehensive to start the production process and user Ren’Py, as I had only used it briefly a long time ago. However the coding process was not too complicated and I was able to add in my character and background along with some lines of text quite easily. Of course, when It comes to adding multiple characters and scene transitions the coding will become more complex, but there are various recourses I am using to learn the program.
