Hello! I am the character designer/artist and animator for Blackout! Great work everyone and thank you all so much for playing our game and your valuable feedback! :heart:

Challenges This was my very first game jam, and thus there were quite a few challenges in setting up a workflow. When we settled on a point and click mystery game, I had no clear ideas for a while. The only set goal I really had was that I really wanted to animate hair. We wanted to have some kind of spooky costumes for all the characters, so at first I just set up a workspace in Aseprite with the dimensions we settled on for the main character (24x64) represented as a dark pink rectangle.

Here you can see the iterations the character went through. What started out as a quick sketch to try out our set dimensions actually slowly morphed into the actual finished character; there were no re-draws, just edits.

Thinking about how I could better telegraph movement for the upper body during animation, i settled on adding buttons and tried out two shirt designs. Since both were basically identical except for the colors, I went on animating the version with the purple shirt, pushing deciding on the final design to the future. However, as I continued on the purple shirt really grew on me and it naturally became the final design.

What's next? For our post-jam version which will release soon, the character design hasn't changed much. The walk cycle has been made a bit smoother and the striped leggings are a bit more polished.

Thank you all so much for all the love for Marilyn and Blackout! :heart: Follow Blackout on itch.io for more news on the post-jam version, releasing soon!