Nova Mondo
On March 31st I gathered with my IST colleagues for the first time, and we outlined some key elements about the game we had previous been discussing - most importantly, the general aesthetic of the game, and elements of lore/backstory for the village of Nova Mondo.
While not absolutely essential to gameplay, we agreed that we needed some sort of backstory for our game in order to justify the concept of a small isolated village with a community of Esperanto speakers. I suggested the idea of a village formed by a group of scientists and survivors after a civilization ending event, who had agreed on Esperanto as a lingua franca for their newly formed community - which, over many years, became the village that our game will be set on.
This small bit of lore gives our game world some flavor, and allows for neat design possibilities - as well in keeping in form with the 'spirit' of the language of Esperanto - a common language with a purpose of unity and peace.
The general aesthetic had already been discussed, since we are drawing heavy inspiration from village/farm simulation RPGs like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, but the backstory agreed on gave me liberty to work with unique design elements. We agreed on a solarpunk concept for our visuals. I have already started designing some concepts for environments from the game - mostly houses, as they seem like the most basic 'building block' in defining an environment. Looking for a style both futuristic and rustic-looking, I have taken inspiration from insects and fruits.
On general game progress, we have defined several areas and NPCs. Once the world map and locations have been established I'll start working on individual area game assets. Most of my concept art so far has been drawn in Photoshop CS6, but I will switch to Asesprite in order to design the pixel art game assets.
My name is Inês Almeida, and I'm a third year Multimedia Arts degree student, majoring in Animation.
This semester I will be working with students from Instituto Superior Técnico's Information Systems and Computer Engineering masters degree in order to create an interactive, playable prototype of a project in the videogame area. Our group is comprised of three people: Inês Ferreira and Pedro Cabral from IST, and myself.
The original pitch of the game we will be developing was a learning-focused, story-driven game that centered around the language of Esperanto.
We hope to engage players into learning a new language by creating a game which promotes exploration and play and combines them with a hands-on, immersive approach.
The game will be a top-down 2D single-player adventure game, with old school RPG influences.
Here I will be posting updates on the development of the game, focusing mostly on the my contributions to its graphical/visual development.
My IST collegues are also running a blog focused on their portion of game development, on which I will also be making ocasional posts. The page can be visited here.
30th March 2017
Nova
Mondo
Inês Almeida
15th April 2017
I've continued to work on assets for different areas of the game. Above are some of the assets for the maze puzzle, an area which will be playable in the prototype present at MOJO.
I've included a mock-up of one of the maze sessions as well as a screenshot the current game built running with my colleague's placeholder art for comparison purposes.
15th May 2017
15th April 2017
Now that MOJO has wrapped up, all that's missing is to make a final recording of what happened at the event, my experience during this semester, and my plans for the future.
First off - MOJO. Unfortunately I couldn't be there for the whole day, but according to my IST colleagues feedback to our game - both in concept and execution - was generally quite good! I got to see our game being played and it was quite fun to see the result of my work come to life and being experienced by others. On the negative side, there were some issues with the game's UI being confusing, and I was a bit disappointed to see that not all of my assets had made it into the playable prototype; but in the end the general showing of the game was met with positive reactions.
Overall I would say it was a good experience. I wanted to try my hand at visual development, pixel art, and working as a team in order to create a game, and I succeeded in all of those aspects.
Since I developed this work for a different class than my other FBAUL classmates, I have decided to continue my work for this game alongside my IST colleagues, so that we can present an even better version than we did at MOJO for our final presentations on our respective classes. So despite this being my final post in this blog, it's not the end for this project yet!
2nd June 2017
Work has been a little slow, but here is a mock-up I've done of the market area, along with pixel art for the same scene.
I've also been working on NPC portraits, sketches shown above.
30th April 2017
Not a lot to write about in this final stretch. I polished up the sprites for the player character and animated their walk cycles, seen above.
30th May 2017