Keep your chin up and don't end up in the crowd

What's that ? A video game ? That's nonsense, the only game I know is tying pans to a cow's tail and seeing it wreak havoc at the village's fair.

(This post follows the posts of my 2 talented colleagues @Furano and @Aune about the work behind Calves of the Braves. The Game engine and Animation aspects covered, it's time to get the tryptic done and talk about the Design.)

3 days for a video game, let's go through the art's natural evolution of this project.

1️⃣ DAY ONE

First day, what's the subject ? What do we want ? We want to have fun. Everybody wants to have fun. How do we do it ? Sumo ? Sounds fun. We like fun. Did everybody in the team drink his coffee ? Right, let's get the first drawings started then.

Make the first drawings quick and dirty, the main point of these roughs is for a dictionary of shapes to emerge.

Try to be as weightless as you were for the roughs and get a first idea on screen with colours.

Something I like as well is to create a poster for the project. Any project can benefit from it, you already have the shapes, the colours, a setup. Try to bring everything together, and see what story comes out of it

It's also a great way to make sure everyone in the team has the same game in mind ! Every drawing must be shown and feedback is mandatory.

At this point we're almost a full day in and we have no assets but a nice tiny graphic bible.

2️⃣ DAY TWO

Art wise, everything is set. It's now just a matter of pushing through. After yesterday's poster I started the first sprites of the character. Today will be dedicated to finishing all the characters sprites and have the background.

Feat the art of @Aune on the small red brawler and the crowd.

Merge everything to see if every element holds up with each others. Turns out we needed to tone down the red or the readability was suffering.

Sadly, the idea of having mid 1950s dudes in the foreground reacting to some beans fighting was lost at some point.

In the same day all the characters were animated.

3️⃣ FINAL DAY

The final day consisted of finishing strong with the UI, the illustrations for the communication and very reactively polishing final assets and details.

👁️‍🗨️ WHAT DID WE LEARN

• Establish graphic language early and commmit to it.
• Even if you commit to it it'll evolve from day 1 to day 3 and it's a beautiful thing.
• Any concept or doodle must be shown to the team and/or the friends. Feedback is required.
• Games are complicated things made with other people, for other people.

Thank you a lot for the read, I had a blast for this first game jam. It's so nice to be able to share games and read about other's experience on this platform. I'll definitely be back for more 😊

@furano From Unity to Godot

@aune Behind an Hybrid Approach for 2D Animation

If you are interested in having a look, the whole source code and assets of our game are available here under GPL 3.0 license. The game itself can be found here.