01: Introduction

This project will be covering dark, psychological topics, so please proceed with caution.

The video game market is a fun and expanding industry, constantly welcoming inspiring programmers to the scene. Beyond learning the difficult ends of coding of video game development, there arises an unseen issue: art. To attract an audience to your developing game, you need to have appealing assets that correspond to the theme and story of your game. But, finding an art style can be difficult and hiring an artist can also be expensive for an indie developer. In this senior project, I will be researching whether pixel art could compete in the game industry and help in the development of an indie horror game.

I am an experienced artist working as a free lancer and an intern at a startup video game company, as well as just for fun. Pixel art was my most recent style I learned during my internship. The learning curve of pixel art was around half a month when I found a style I was happy with, compared to my much more detailed 2d style which took me 3 years to find. Being an avid fan of horror games as well, I looked for inspiration in other horror pixel art games like To The Moon and FAITH: The Unholy Trinity for reference. How were they able to create such atmospheres with little sprites and small color palettes? These inspirations led me to draw my own pixel sprite monsters.

Pixel art is the art compacting a large image into its fundamental parts. Basically, it’s drawing on a 32×32 pixel canvas rather than a 2048×2048. Drawing on a smaller scale can reduce the resources and time needed for creating the assets. The final goal of this project is to develop a short psychological horror game using my pixeled monster art and my partner’s, Cindy Lu, story. I wish to see if pixel art could be more efficient and effectively convey the dark themes of our game. To accomplish this, I will be looking at content creators’ reactions to different monster designs in varying art styles. From seeing what type of monsters are most effective in scaring the player, I will create three of my own designs focusing on the topics of alienation, body dysphoria, and isolation of our main character.

Boo! Why a horror game? Horror is one of, is not, the largest genres in the game industry. With popular titles such as Five Nights at Freddy’s, Omori, and the recent release of Lethal Company, it’s growing franchise that can allow indie developers to hit it big if there game gathers enough attention. Also because I love big scary monsters and I need an excuse to shove them into a game.

Progress This Week

This week I focused on setting up our game’s Github repository and set up a simple framework of our game using free assets. Cindy and I decided to use Unity since I had the most experience with game development with it. We were able to implement basic character movement and triggers to switch scenes. I was also able to learn how to use Unity’s tile map function, which is building the game world in a grid out of prefabs. Sadly we weren’t able to finish setting up a dialogue system this week to due my partner leaving me for Disneyland for half the week 🙁 But no worries! We are surprisingly ahead of schedule so come back next week when we start on simple menu that is able to save and load data and the start of our character being able to talk and interact!