IAMAGAMER: Post-Mortem

The first post on my animation blog! Last weekend I participated in my first game jam, organized by IAMAGAMER with the theme 'strong female protagonist'. The jam was created in response to this Gamasutra article's topic specifically, but also the male-bias video games have in general. This issue is very close to my heart and I wanted to start making art for games, so I signed up ASAP.

Our 4-man team (programmer, level designer, writer/artist, and myself as character artist) created a top-down exploration game named 'Hex', which you can play or download on our submission page.

Concept: Early in the concept stage we decided we'd have two playable protags, which let our game pass the Bechdel Test and allowed us to flesh out two very different characters, both visually and internally.

If it weren't for this bad bitch, ya'll
wouldn't even be making games.

We wanted a spunky, determined scientist to counter the rather jaded witch character, so I went with boyish clothes and an out-of-the-face hair style. I was also personally tired of African-American women in games/media having straight European hair styles, especially in fiction where it is easy to simply sketch a white woman and make her skin darker. The game is set in the 1700's when female clothing was fairly impractical for adventuring and experimenting, though in retrospect I think I would have liked her to rock the Ada Lovelace: Woman Scientist Badass look.






Bellatrix, the witch (both characters are named for stars in Orion's Constellation), is a grumpy and jaded character, personality traits pretty consistent with being a witch in the 1700's.

GRR Martin and Miyazaki know
what's up.

My initial concepts were on pretty opposite ends of the witch spectrum - a shamanistic face-paint look with unnatural hair colours, and an elegant lady with a get-shit-done haircut. I received positive feedback from my team on the face-paint and animal skull, which I decided to keep as a fun type of decoration but combined with a natural hair colour. Her clothing is a bit more fantasy Middle-Eastern (i.e. Prince of Persia, Lawrence of Arabia) which in retrospect conceptually clashes with her white skin and ginger hair. I did want more feminine clothing than Oriana's, to avoid the trope of capable women acting and dressing like men.

Too tall for square
collision boxes

Execution: The jam started at 6pm, and after an hour of commencement and team planning, I began sketching. I finished the above concepts around 8pm, and began drafting the actual in-game sprites. Oriana first looked like this version, after which I found out it had to fit inside a square collision box (the game was made in Unity, by the way). I switched to a more top-down angle and deformed the proportions so the sprites would better fit their boxes.

Having been recently infatuated with Guacamelee, and feeling like retracing clean lines over the sketch would take too much time, I decided to render the sprites in a pseudo-vector style. I used one layer per colour and used the pen tool (Photoshop CS6) to create the shapes of the face, eyes, clothing pieces etc, which I was then able to lock the layers of and apply super quick gradient shadows. I ended up not using the gradients in-game as it took too much time to adjust for mirroring, but it made for some pretty sharp portrait/promo images to use later. I uploaded each sprites' frame individually as a transparent .png to the programmer.

The monster was an identical process except that he only had 2 frames - floating up, and floating down. When crunched for time Phil shared with me the wisdom that flying/floating creatures do not necessarily need walk cycles. Phil brought a Dark Souls concept art book to flip through, and everyone's favourite monsters featured some sort of body horror. Garish proportions and extra eyes and mouths were a fun change from chibi sprites. I had more time to work on the monster and I feel like it better reflects the style I'd have gone for if I had more time.

I also created the opening comic to explain the plot for players as quickly as possible and made the cave floor texture. All the other detailing (projectiles, stone tiles, etc) were done by Nathalie.

Retrospective / Things I Learned

• Creating a Flash rig is really valuable when only dealing with a few models
• Maintaining a line of symmetry makes mirroring way less of a headache
• Incorporate a dip or leg shortening in the step-frames (especially important with only 3 frame walks) so the character bobs up and down
• Sleeping 8 hours each night is probably not necessary but allowed me to function at 100%
• Take breaks to stretch outside and let problems that need to be solved rest

I am really looking forward to my next game jam!