Home Tripper is a visual novel / point and click adventure game made for Ludum Dare 49 and can be played in your browser or downloaded.

I contributed the art to this game including a small amount of writing, and I wanted to share my experience developing artwork over the 3 days of the game jam.

How I Got Involved

As someone with no prior game development experience, doing this jam was something decided a day or two before it started when yojammerjammer contacted me on Discord to ask if I'd like to get involved. I had recently posted a short introduction in the Ren'Py Discord channel saying I was an artist interested in creating graphics for visual novels. At the time I had an in-progress character piece to study the graphics of a NEC PC-98 game remake, and I had some experience making pixel art previously, but very little environment artwork in my portfolio, and no animation to speak of. Although my game art experience is limited, I knew I wanted to make artwork in this direction, so I agreed to participate.

Motivations to Participate

One thing I was worried about was that I would be too slow making assets. Some of the detailed colored artwork I've made previously took around 14-20 hours each. Although I'm confident I will get faster with practice, I knew I wasn't experienced enough to produce that kind of style for a jam with a 72 hour time limit, and that I would have to make simplifications. Some other personal motivations for participating included a desire to test myself, to see how much I could produce in a short time, and to see how I would work creatively with a team. Usually I work solo, but the reality is if I ever want to be a professional illustrator I need to be able to work with others and produce artwork to other people's specifications. I saw Ludum Dare as an opportunity to see how that would work. Another thing is that I have never let art take up my entire day, or for days at a time. A game jam would be a completely different way of doing things for me.

The Team

We communicated by Discord in a text channel which went pretty smoothly. We made a Google Drive folder for keeping any artwork, GUIs, buttons, and writing. Sometimes we lost track of messages, so maybe for next time putting some key updates into a folder or shared document might be useful, I had to use the search function a few times to look for earlier messages. Overall, I feel everyone made substantial contributions the final game, it was a pretty balanced workload shared between us, and many of us contributed to the brainstorming, writing, and helping debug at the end.

Developing the Artwork

Early on, I made a Pinterest board for visual reference which was eventually arranged into the following folders: Modern Interior, Colour Schemes, Retro Interior, Patterns, and Appliances. I designed the logo and chose the font for the in-game company, Xylene, based on musk sticks (explained in game but is a maybe not-so-subtle reference to someone with the last name Musk). The colour scheme for the logo determined the colours for the appliances, since they're all made by the same company.

Initially I considered a 1970s/1960s retro style for the rooms, some of which are extremely colourful with detailed patterns and decorations. However, I didn't have any time to add any of these patterns to the rooms, and the colour scheme ended up being pretty simple. The environments ended up leaning toward more modern style rooms, which I felt matched the science fiction theme a bit better. That said, the appliances were leaning toward retro in design, with a lot of rounded edges, like on this fridge.

The appliances were fun to draw. The style is mainly black line art with minimal colours. Initially, I planned on sticking to the pink-grey-white scheme of the company logo, but had to expand when it became difficult to communicate some of the designs (for example, the electronic display on the clock).

I bounced a few ideas for the more out-there designs off the team, which helped shape some of them – but it would be a spoiler to say more about that except that the game has the word Tripper in it for a reason.

Retrospective

Overall, I really enjoyed my time contributing to Home Tripper. I was pleasantly surprised with how many assets I was able to produce for the game, given I hadn't worked full days on making art before, and it is honestly the most artwork I've made in such a short space of time. It is also the first time I drew modern interiors (I did attempt a few earlier in the year but never finished them – that practice wasn't a waste of time!), and it let me put into practice some of the perspective drawing I've learned. It also forced me to speed up my decision making. I usually spend a lot of time collecting reference images, making reference boards, and deliberating over what to draw and how, experimenting with different compositions and colours, but this time I just had to pick something and move on.

This project did make me painfully aware of areas I still need to work on. Mainly, I fell back on a simplistic style to save time, but I would have really liked to be able to add some extra details next time. On the plus side, I think the minimal colour scheme helped create a mysterious mood. Another really useful thing was being able to learn what kinds of graphical decisions need to be made when making a GUI, and when making an environment clickable, including making objects highlight.

Final thoughts

I enjoyed producing artwork for a this project, and I feel lucky yojammerjammer found me through the Ren'Py Discord as I hadn't even heard of Ludum Dare until then. I think I will try Ren'Py after this, so I can understand the code of the game a bit better and be more helpful debugging. I enjoyed the challenge of the jam, and I think every artist wanting to learn more about the game production process should do at least one. It's an opportunity to work with others and have some fun (and share some stress during the final hours putting the game together)!

Thanks for listening.

Tarren

If you'd like to play Home Tripper, click here. Please consider rating if you enjoyed the game!