Devlog_10-8_ArtBuild

The process of getting what to what my "Art Build" is was... complicated.
First of all, after sharing my prototype, I got some valuable feedback which has since altered the design of my game. While there were tons of smaller notes that helped, I had two that stood out and are driving me forward in my current iterations.

The first one of these was considering the narrative's structure and continuity. I initially just wanted my court cases to be vignettes, I was given a note that it may be interesting to have cases tie into one another. I think this is a great idea as the experience is quite long enough to warrant multiple vignettes, and tying multiple stories together emphasizing the theme of subjective analysis versus objective.

The second note I got was regarding the game's art. I initially had little to no clue what my art would be until a classmate and friend of mine suggested I use real-life images. I referenced this as well as a youtube video I cited in my last Devlog to lead me towards pixelating and applying higher brightness and contrast to real-life images.
Above is a screenshot from my Art Build. I decided to use myself as a stand-in for a character, since while I can use stock images, I want each of the characters to switch between multiple poses to emphasize different emotions. I think that the art will be a large factor in enhancing the humanity of my characters which is essential to the story I'm telling.

To take these photos I used, what can liberally be called, a "DIY Camera Rig":

To actually stylize the images, I used Photoshop where I cut myself out of the image, applied a pixelization mosaic filter, increased both brightness and contrast, and finally add some slight sharpening before resizing the image to 1080p. The high resolution of my phone camera helped to reduce the off-putting qualities of pixelization since it had more pixels to work with. In my prototype, my images were lower resolution so the faces were often distorted.

The content of the build is pretty sparse as the script is still a work in progress. The beginning of the prologue I have written is below:

A major hurdle in getting this build up was spending the majority of my time on a feature I ultimately wasn't able to get working. There are multiple menus throughout the game where you pick options, and I wanted certain menus to have a different aesthetic. My reference was a sequence in an indie visual novel named "The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo" as shown by the regular menu and then an end-game special themed menu:

I spent many hours attempting to implement a different color for a menu where you are interacting with the Ai character, but all attempts, even with the help of our real-world counterpart in Chat-GPT, my attempts failed. In the future, I want to prevent something like this from happening again by prioritizing reaching my MVP before pursuing a feature I think would enhance the experience that isn't present yet.

I am hoping to solve this issue, continue developing my script, and getting more actors for characters soon!