It's been a week since LD50 ended so I wanted to share some thoughts on making the art of STUDY LADY (cookie mix)

The Concept: An Upgradeable Music Video

The idea @PeachTreeOath and I decided to explore is an upgradeable music video. We both love the livetune - Transfer music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayL4pzictu8 We wanted to do something similar but as a game where our character is constantly trying to delay something from happening which would be the main animation loop, and the player would help by upgrading the world around her to unlock future worlds (to continue the delay). So for visuals there were three main things we needed to figure out:

1. The main animation loop of delaying something
2. The different worlds (we decided on three)
3. The upgradeable objects in each world the player would interact with

Our original brainstorm sketches were extremely busy & rough to say the least...

Friday: Figuring Out The Story

We liked the idea of delaying a small disaster as we thought that'd be funnier (and easier to implement.) Basically trying to recreate the stress and doom around delaying something relatively minor from happening. The original story was one of a cat knocking down a vase while multiple family members try and fail to keep the vase from falling. I actually even started working on implementing that idea:

As I was working on it I realized it'd be too ambitious. It involved multiple characters and since we were talking about scenes being 3 seconds long at the time I thought it'd be really hard to convey something that made sense without a lot of details to tie everything together. Five hours had already passed and we still didn't have an idea of what we were doing so it was time to go to basics. I gave myself a 15 minute timeframe and storyboarded the first idea that came to mind that felt feasible:

And that's pretty much what we ended up doing! I can't remember where the idea of referencing lo-fi study girl came from, but I decided to go with that for the first scene and world. Then scene two was going to be the ridiculous scene where you see the girl try to catch this milk cup. Scene three and four I wanted to be fun perspective shots that would be interesting to look at. Finally scene five is the breather shot of just the milk cup going to the next world.

Saturday: Main Animation Loop & World One Lines

I had two goals for Saturday which was to draw out the main animation loop and figure out the scenes of world one. For me, LD Saturday is all about working on big pieces & items while you have energy. The whole day was spent drawing in Procreate without exporting anything to Unity. It wasn't until maybe one hour after midnight that I finally completed my goal and the first pieces of not placement art got put in. The following is messy since it's showing all the frames at once:

Sunday: Fleshing Out World One & Three

Sunday was a push to see what was really doable in terms of creating finished assets. I wanted to completely color the main animation loop as @PeachTreeOath was working on animating it in Unity. At this point we hadn't figured out how long each scene would be which would be important for figuring out everything else. Figuring out how long it'd take to color world one was also important as that was the most taxing world as a more realistic painted world.

Near the end of Sunday there was definitely a lot of fatigue happening so I took a break from coloring world one and worked on world three. I think when you're pushing yourself during a jam it's nice to be able to switch between different types of tasks. I knew I wanted world three to be a fun sketchy world. We ended up deciding on a space theme and after nearly 14 hours of working on world one it was a lot of fun to just scribble around a bit drawing something new.

Monday: Everything Else

Final day was absolutely crazy - it's honestly kinda blurry! I was definitely running on adrenaline, and we absolutely worked down to the last minute. I remember writing down a prioritized list of all the things left to do and just systematically going down it. Kanban boards are great, but when you're short on energy & time nothing beats a good old to-do list in notepad. Main things were completely creating world two, finishing world one and three which I had only fully colored the first scene for, and drawing UI pieces. I remember just having ten minutes left to scribble out the logo, but somehow - we made it!

(SPOILERS) All the final art without Unity animations & UI pieces:

Conclusion

• Drawing something you enjoy is key to staying motivated through 72 hours. World three was so fun for me to draw I didn't mind staying up for it, and it went by so quickly. In general for jams I think scribble art is best art!
• Figure out a minimum canvas size early and use that - I just did a large canvas size as I'm used to it but could have saved me a lot of probably unnecessary pen strokes.
• Taking your own reference photos for specific poses and angles can really help save time.

If you've gotten this far - thanks for reading! Also thanks to everyone who has played our game. If you haven't and want to check it out please do: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/study-lady-cookie-mix

If you're interested in talking games & game design with us also feel free to chat with us on our discord: https://discord.gg/feafSea

Happy Monday everyone! Hope everyone is having a good time recovering & playing entries