Near the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 I was working alongside Ben Allen and @hellomavw on a project called "9 Till Void". I was doing the art design and concepts working with Ben's early, loose ideas. In the end, Ben decided to tackle the art of the game himself. However, I have a whole bunch of fun concepts and designs that I made while we were working together! Sometimes projects fall through, but it's pretty fun to look at how we ended up getting to that final mock-up posted above! Designing a player character is always a pretty important task. Going with Ben's of the player character being a wizard, we toyed around a lot with what a "wizard" should look like. We even had to settle on the proportions. We landed on a middle-ground between cartoony and realistic proportions, big feet and hands, to have a fantasy charm. What attacks you in a dream? A Baku! At least, that's what one of my first ideas for an enemy was. An early concept for the game's story was that you were inside of a dream. Baku are japanese mythological creatures that eat dreams! I had a bit of trouble making this little creature look threatening enough and I think I failed in the end because I just want to hug them!!! One enemy does not a rogue-lite make, however! So I mocked up a BUNCH!! I really like to do a scattershot approach to design. If I can get you 15 designs to pick from then you'll be able to pick bits and pieces from each one and I can focus my lens on what it is you're really looking for! Played around with a lot of different ideas. Tropes from fantasy, general spooky things, some Alice In Wonderland imagery, and even some cryptids! Ben picked out the three for me to polish and clean up, however. The Baku, Chimera, and Nekomata all up in the top right corner.
In the end, my art didn't make it into the final game. But Ben made a really cool, fun, unique rogue-like and I ended up with a lot of fun concepts and some good experience!
Go check out 9 Till Void on itch.io!!
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