ADORE

Next up is another idea I've had sitting in my head for ages and ages... And just like Colourless, the game I ended up with was very different from what I imagined from the start.

I wanted to design a little 2D platformer that was a love story. It was going to be about a girl and a boy who couldn't bear to be apart, and it was meant to be a little bit moody and very toned down and quite artsy. I started doing a little mind map for it but couldn't quite put my finger on what I was actually after, so I abandoned it.

Then one day I listened to Björk and realised that the lyrics for Unravel summed the game up beautifully:

while you are away
my heart comes undone
slowly unravels
in a ball of yarn
the devil collects it
with a grin
our love
in a ball of yarn

he'll never return it

so when you come back
we'll have to make new love 

BAM! There it was. Two characters who need to stay within a certain distance of each other during the entire game, or bad things happen. When they are together again, they are happy and radiate love.

I started writing.

 

I left it here for a few days. I still wasn't quite happy with what I'd written. "Low key", "realistic", "evolve relationship"... Bleh. Not inspiring. 

I decided that if I'm going to be building a game while working full time at Blitz (=STRESSFUL!) it had to be a happy game. It had to be cute. It needed charm. So I did something different.

The characters went from being a boy and a girl to an owl and a deer - my favouritest animals on the planet (at the moment, anyway). Instead of having the characters becoming sad and breaking up if they ever move too far apart I introduced the shadows; an abstract and much less depressing threat. I could easily visualise these chubby cute lil' characters hugging and creating this aura of love while shadows reach for them in the background... And I was much, much happier with this direction.

Onwards to Photoshop and Illustrator!

The sketch for the final image was done in Photoshop and then I brought it into Illustrator for colour. 

 

Finished image:

Having drawn this, it was easy peasy to write a description I was happy with. Here's the finished page:

Click, then right click, and select "view image" to zoom.

...which ironically ended up as an image file anyway, because I couldn't figure out how to host PDF files on Blogger. Meh!

Next up: LITTLE FAT PONIES! But first, coffee in town.

Cheerios,
Andrea