Physical Manifestations of Struggle in the Form of Pixelated Monsters
Advisor: Jaymie Silva
Onsite Mentor: Dan Tack
Context:
In this research project, I will be finding if the pixel art medium could have a similar effect like other more rendered art styles in the horror game genre. If pixel art has a similar standard to other art mediums, this would allow starting indie game developers to have an easier access to quality art but not as time consuming or expensive. As someone who is looking to enter the game development sphere, time and money is a huge issue when it comes to creating games. Lowering the art barrier could allow for more thought into story/world building as well as new mechanics.
Methods:
First, I will play psychological horror games that contain monsters; I will record my own reactions and shifts of empathy caused by noticing details of the design. After learning of my reactions, I will watch a randomized set of streamers' reactions and see what design features are detected and how their reactions change. I will record my and streamer's reactions on a 1-5 scale on how excited they were when a creature appeared. I will then analyze the monsters, gather as much detail about the design as possible, and categorize them based on similar features such as color, size, physical details, and gore. Using this information, I know what parts of my design should be emphasized to convey my desired reaction.
The final product of this research will be my own concept artwork of monsters in the pixel art style. I will then create, with the help of my partner Cindy, a game put my monsters into context through being in the environment and in cutscenes.
Hypothesis:
I believe that using pixel art will help decrease the stimulation of the game environment and allot players more of their focus on absorbing story elements. The relatively reduced barrier of pixel art facilitates game developers in allocating more of their resources and money towards worldbuilding and game mechanics, thereby streamlining entry into the indie game industry with greater ease, in both time and financial investment.
Significance:
The video game market is huge and has only grown since the onset of COVID-19, when everything went virtual. Successful horror games like Five Nights At Freddy’s, Omori, and the recent Lethal Company achieved significant commercial success with millions of copies sold. Most of the top games currently are horror genres, and I aim to reduce the entry barriers to this industry, particularly in terms of artistic requirements.
Project Blog
Post 1: 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 32x32 pixel canvas rather than a 2048x2048. 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!
Post 2: 02: Weekly Coding Suffering: Spawn Locations and NPCs
Welcome back to another week of suffering with code and art! Well not art yet, just code. Just. Coding. I want to do art :(
This Week's Progress
This week, I focused on relearning Unity's Scriptable Object Class. This class helps persistent data between sessions. And the best way to show my understanding of this topic was to code the player to spawn in specific locations when changing scenes! The player should spawn by the doorway and not in the middle of the room to simulate entering a room. Easier said than done.
To accomplish this, I created three scriptable objects to contain the player's spawn location of the current scene, a level manager which allows us to assign the player's new spawn location and switch scenes, and a player manager to find the spawn location and instantiate a player prefab at that location. I ran into so many errors because of naming issues and forgetting to label objects. So many errors... But, it eventually worked! With these objects coded in, it will also help us further down the line with maybe an inventory system and other triggers for puzzles. So that's a positive!
I also added an NPC to test our dialogue and choices system, which was easier. This was also easily done with another script that could take in a boolean values to see if it's a question or the end and a list of all the dialogue. I also added in the option trigger events that can allow us to use for puzzles and check if the player made a correct choice in speaking to NPCs.
Next Week
Next week is going to be hectic. Cindy and I talked, and we realized we needed a lot more function to our game than expected. I'll be starting on actual art too! Our main character will finally be alive with an idle and walk animation.
Stay tuned to maybe see some artwork for the game if I figure out how to upload images!
Unity tutorials are my saving grace.
Post 3: 03: Main Character Art & Relief From Coding Inferno
There's art! There's finally art! Yippeeeee!!! Welcome in 瀑牢, Cordelia or Raven! We are still choosing one-
This Week's Progress
The original design (the green and summery one) was immediately scrapped due to not fitting our game's theme and being too bouncy of a character. Following our art inspiration collage board, I recolored her to colder colors and changed her hairstyle to a long, unkempt hairstyle to represent her sickly, Victorian nature. I also slowed her animation down so she would appear more sluggish when compared to other NPCs in the game. Overall, I enjoyed both designs, but chose the latter design to better illustrate her personality through art.
So happiness aside, let's talk about my debugging experience. I decided to implement our dialogue system with an external editor called Inky instead of my previous code. I went with this switch since it is easier to manage and much neater on our end. Inky would give us a preview of how our dialogue and choices would look before we attached it to an NPC. With this setup, would ease the process for Cindy when she creates multiple dialogue chains for her project.
My main error problem during this time was that Unity wasn't reading the variables I created in Inky. After reading through the manual and a couple of tutorial videos, I had to create another Inky file to read the global variables. From there, I created a dictionary with each variable being a keyword and assigning the value from the Inky file to its corresponding variable. Alongside it is a method that constantly checks if a variable was changed based on player choices and another public method that allows any script to search the dictionary for a variable. Tiring, I know.
I have finally started my research portion of this project! I started by choosing which monsters I'd be analyzing for this project and categorizing their appearances by color, size, physical details, gore, and how human-like they are. The monsters I'll be looking into will be all the bosses in Poppy Playtime and Omori, as well as 3 of the most well known abnormalities from Lobotomy Corporation. With appearances recorded, I will watch a bunch of Youtube videos of streamers reacting to the first cutscene of each boss and rate their reaction from 1 to 5.
Rating System:
1 - little to no reaction, glosses over
2 - acknowledgement of the scare including commenting on the monster, no physical reaction
Example: passively saying “oh wow that monster appeared so suddenly.”
3 - softer involuntary vocal reactions, little to no physical reaction
Example: a hitched breath or a soft “omg”
4 - a small physical jolt or loud involuntary vocal reactions including screaming and cursing
5 - big physical movement like jumping out of the chair usually paired with vocal reactions
Next Week
I'll post my finding after watching hours of streams... Time for popcorn I guess.
Post 4: 04: Brainrotting at its finest
I took a well-needed break from coding this week and discovered a new kind of suffering! Storyboarding. There is no happiness. Only pain.
Spoilers for our game ahead!
Research
This week's work was dedicated to watching hours of streams of people screaming at jumpscares. For my Poppy Playtime monster research, I focused on the player's reaction to the first encounter and the main, scary moment of each monster. For Huggy Wuggy, the height difference and the emergence from the dark became an iconic jumpscare of the game. This monster reaction averaged around 3.9 on the scale (my ears hurt). On top of that came the vent chase scene. It first reassured the player of safety, but only to show Huggy Wuggy was also in the vents with you and emerged traveling towards the player. This immediate follow-up chase had a lesser reaction around 3.6, because of players being on higher alert or turning too early to notice Huggy Wuggy charging at the player.
The Mommy Long Legs hide-and-seek scene was so far the most reactive jumpscare out of the bunch, averaging at 4.3. Making it seem the player could escape and the monster jumping down onto the player unexpectedly was super effective. Then the hide-and-seek scene, which plays into the "parents counting down to zero," completely freaks the player out with the monster appearing at any moment and with spider motifs. Despite both of these monsters not being traditionally scary monsters by itself, their cutscenes, animations, and interactions with the environment made them the most reactive monsters on the list. When creating the monster designs and storyboards, I will pay attention to the height and their unexpected entrances.
These findings inspired my concept artwork for the alienation monster cutscene. The monster will be the first boss encounter so we have the element of surprise. The player will walk down an endless brightly lit forest/jungle until they meet a condition (Still deciding) to represent Raven not seeking to deal with the issue. Once she finds the condition, the end of the forest will become a silhouette of trees. The monster will initially appear as a human silhouette onto a play structure. After the dialogue, it will transform into a much bigger monster and initiate a tutorial boss fight. The player will lose this fight and will begin a chase sequence.
The game, Omori, is more reliant on haunting and unsettling story telling than chase sequences or quick jumpscares. From the results of my research, their more environmental and story-telling jumpscares and a hit or miss when physically scaring the player, but they were extremely effective when showing the horrors of the moment. The cutscene for meeting the body dysphoria monster will be using the techniques shown here. The first appearance of this monster will be through the reflection in a mirror. It will be seen crying on Raven’s bed before appearing behind her and initiating the fight. I’ll show storyboards of these in the following weeks.
Story Planning
We finally laid out the story of chapter one will look like! We probably should have done this earlier but better now than later! I now have a list of game object will need to create for this project. I also learned that house and puzzle designs are hard ughhh. We laid out what our combat against the monsters will look like as well. At least I'm more hyped up!
Next Week
I get to experience what unpaid artists with deadlines feel like.
Post 5: 05: Exhaustion
I'm not late posting this. Repeat after me. I totally did not forget and I am not late.
Cutscene:
We got a functional intro cutscene now yippee! This was a test making a full screen animation in Aseprite (the pixel art software I am using) as well as using the Timeline function in Unity. The setting is during a therapy meeting where the doctor gives her a diary to write down her feelings. The colors I chose were a softer pink and purple color palette to give off a more comfortable vibe when going into the story, a stark contrast to the horrors to come. The reason for this is because I didn’t want to portray talking to others about issues or going to therapy in a bad light. This is meant to be a safe space for Raven. After receiving the diary, the screen will fade to black and another cutscene for a tutorial will begin but I haven't started on that.
Monster Designs:
This research purpose was to learn more about the mental health issues we will be tackling in this game and how to portray them through monsters.
Alienation:
Raven was diagnosed with a chronic illness when she was a child, resulting in her ghostly sickly appearance. Her parents were the busy absent type so she was incredibly lonely. One day during her childhood, she went to the park nearby to play with others, but the children, not used to seeing others that look as ghostly as her, made harsh comments about her appearance and refused to play with her. The monster design would need to reflect how these comments and her failed attempt to interact with others affected her at a young age. Initially meeting the monster would be a silhouetted human on top of the play structure before transforming into a monster with a large mouth and multiple eyes to represent their comments and unsettling gazes towards Raven.
Body Dysphoria:
Raven would now start pointing out stuff about her appearance based on what the children said. She never noticed it before until she was rejected from society. This will be a humanoid creature that appears after looking at Raven’s reflection. It would be a crying eyeless creature with bony fingers and an indistinguishable body. The colors of the monster would be similar to Raven’s to reflect Raven’s perception about her physical self.
Isolation:
There isn’t going to be a full confrontation with this monster just yet since isolation is the main issue Raven is dealing with and will be a main boss later in the actual game. There will be a teaser cutscene about this monster at the end of the demon. It should appear to be a friendly recognizable person as a lure to cut off connections with others. I’ll make another version where it shows its true self, being a small curled up creature enwrapped with veiny tentacles to push others away.
Post 6: 06: Backgrounds. The backgrounds drove me crazy. Crazy?
I want to draw but I'm just worn out from coding. Ughhhhh
I decided to continue this trend of soft cold color within the bedroom, mainly to be aesthetic and match Raven but also to give off a cold comfortable feeling. The wallpaper is shown to resemble bars to resemble her entrapment due to her weak state (our setting is within a dream world of her experiences, so that’s why she’s able to move around in the game). Next to her bed is a mirror which forces her to see herself every time she gets up. The bareness of the room is because she didn’t do much aside from staying in bed. This room was a comfortable nothingness to her.
It is extremely.. empty. Even for an empty room- I've currently only drawn the essential sprites we would need for the demo. I'll continue fleshing out the environment with whatever time I have left!
The moment she leaves her room, she’s met with a much more vibrant hallway. This is to emphasize her parents neglecting her mental wellbeing by taking care of the entire house except her room. Through walking down this hallway, the player interacts with the door to the parents’ bedroom where Raven is too afraid to bother them, and many photos of her parents. Raven will be able to interact with only one photo that shows her.
I initially colored everything to have cold colors, similar to that of the bedroom but decided against that. One, the mild shock favor when exiting the room. Two, her bedroom should stand out since it'll be important feature of the game.
Again very empty- it'll look much better next week!
I’m still designing the layout of the main house but it’ll include a wide area that allows Raven to find more journal entries, a door that leads to the stairs and another to the bathroom which both she is too afraid to confront, and interact with more photographs. It’ll continue the design from the hallway.
I don't know much about house designing so I referenced Omori's houses layouts for help haha. The forest background will be the longest to fully render out so stay tuned for that! Also I get to FINALLY start drawing my creepy little monsters hehehee
Post 7: 07: Monsters Exist
They're alive! It's ALIVEEE
Anyways.
This game is Raven's journey through her trauma in a dreamlike space. The demo will be covering the start of Raven's trauma during her childhood. The One Who Bites represents other children mocking her sickly and frail appearance while The One Who Shatters represents the way she views herself after.
Monster Designs:
The One Who Bites: Alienation
My partner mentioned something about how the monsters should have connections to birds, like if the bird was corrupted. I thought it was a cool idea so hence the bird shaped head! TOWB would be like an initial juxtaposition to the guide (an actual bird). The flailing thing on its monster's back is the front it puts up when our main character first interacts with her. After saying some inconsiderate things, Raven will see the person as a monster and initiate the boss fight that will fail. This animation is for the chase sequence.
The walk cycle is a bit messed up- it'll be fixed :,D
Post 8: 08: *insert jumpscare*
Repeat after me. I am NOT late to posting again.
Did I show the house yet? Eh here it is again if I did yippeee! Still need to furnish it-
Ooo spoopy. I stopped procrastinating and finished the jungle background! I might change the background color but the unnatural bright green kinda works? I can’t tell. It contrasts with the house’s bright colors, giving an unexpected dark turn to a pastel world. Also let me rant about how easy it is to add detail on pixel art. Aseprite (the software I’m using) has so many tools like jumble, blur, and gradient that helped make the trees and the background. I don’t have to randomly place pixels since the software does it for me! Oh the time that was saved.
I have underestimated the animation process. Animation is hard, but my experience with pixel art animation has been better than my 2d animation. The lower resolution helps a lot with the color choices and lineart. In my opinion, it’s easier to change a few pixels than an entire line.
I have finished the jungle cutscene where the person on the play structure transformed. I tried going for an unnatural low fps transformation. Yeah.. I’m still working on that. I'll probably add a couple more frames and adjust the timing to get the staggered look I want.
Game Update: I am slowly importing all the artwork we have so far into our game! Stay tune for that hehehe
I'm so tired.
Post 9: 09: Boss Art!
3 tone color palette:
The red color, in contrast to the black and white, is heavily saturated. This draws attention to the spots of red, and the harsh distinction evokes a sense of being out of place. Naturally, this also draws attention to the monsters themselves; they’re impossible to look away from.
The One Who Bites:
The red and white contrast heavily with the black background. I'm attempting to draw the attention of the player to the multiple eyes as well as the dead body attached to the monster (I'll try making it look more like a body than a red blob on it haha)
The One Who Shatters:
The red makes the mask stand out while also covering the human with its red hands. It makes a distinction between the human and monster. The red eyes surrounding and obstructing the white eye pulls the attention of being stared at.
ALSO! I have finally started importing the art into unity! Soo far nothing as been broken? We pray.
Once I have finished setting up the different scenes, we will be implementing the cutscenes!
Post 10: 10: Ever feel like crying? Don't worry I spent an hour fixing something on to find out that I was in play mode and none of my work saved
I have no life. Also I feel like I labeled my weeks wrong? Is it already week 10? Oh boy-
This week was dedicated to scenes and game art. Movement bounds. I want to cry.
Each scene had different movement bounds and I had to go into play and pause the game to check if Raven didn’t look too awkward in the scene. Took about 3 hours of work. I’m exhausted, but Raven can finally move around to each room of her house!! Some assets aren’t there yet since I’m planning on some cutscenes for them. Overall, extremely happy with how the art looks!
Now for some more crying.
Cutscenes.
See, despite doing cutscenes before on my personal test games, I have forgotten everything. You don’t understand how many tutorials I had to pull up to relearn it. It finally works! But I need to pair it with the battle scene and separate the walking up to the monster and the jumpscare into two different timeline objects and activate the cutscene via dialogue ink files. :) …. It’s less complicated than it sounds…. Hopefully… please…. Nothing has broken yet.
Post 11: The Final Art Grind
I’ve finally sat myself down and finished this cutscene! Some changes probably will be made to the jumpscare before the final product since it feels rough.
One trouble I came across when making this cutscene was the expression on Raven’s face. The limited amount of pixels made it extremely hard to show facial emotions through eyebrows and eyes. To accomplish Raven’s terrified look, I used art references from the game Omori and added the sweat drop animation. Raven’s hyperventilation and sweat drops helps add to her current emotions and the panic attacks she's going through at the moment. And with the dark blue overlay, it creates a dark environment.
Am I playing into stereotypes with the sweat drop? Personally I don't think I am, and if I am I don't think it's a harmful one. Cold sweat is usually associated with the feeling of fear and helplessness. Without it, Raven looks uncomfortably bobbing, but I wanted to convey a feeling of a panic attack. With pixel art limited space, expression is hard to pull of, so any additional features that can help the reader understand is extremely useful.
Another trouble was just the limited art ability. I don’t know how to animate some actions aka the pulling back animation when the monster pulls Raven back. I’ll try cleaning it up when I’m not lazy or if I find a reference. I’ll probably just end up recreating the scene in real life and record that on my phone for reference. The things I do for art.
The Jungle cutscene is finally implemented in the game!!! It does have an error where there’s an extra empty dialogue box overlaying the cutscene (can be removed when the space bar is clicked but still annoying). But it is playing according to our layout so we good 👍
Post 12: Presentation grind
Presentations are done !!!
This is totally not a late post because I was sleeping in on the weekends.
We finished implementing both cutscenes! But my partner and I decided to put each boss fight into different scenes, making it easier to attached dialogue. Some adjustments need to be made, but you can interact watch the cutscenes!
Now what's left of the grind to the final product?
I few more animations from me,
Animation tutorial scene
Minor puzzle with Cindy
I really do hope we can finish this demo by the end of the month, but if not except to see an art portfolio!