How I got there
I wanted to apply my 2D drawing skill to a game and I’d meant to participate in a game jam for years; but the traditional format of 48 hours online competition never really appealed to me.
When Wizard Jam 4 came around, I had not done any serious game making in 6 months – having left Ubisoft Singapore and spent my time backpacking, drawing/painting and reading – and it turned out to be the best opportunity:
1. it was 3 weeks long, so I didn’t have to neglect my life to participate
2. I got to do portrait arts – which I love – and sort of background art which I wanted to get better at.
3. There was no integration and no coding to do!
What I got to do
Rilen/Hellameaty ‘hired’ me to do character arts for spin off/parody of the Hitman series, and since, I was hanging out at a friend’s apartment in Singapore, with my normal drawing supplies and an ancient scanner; I got to also some prep
Characters
Research
I had not done art for somebody vision else before, so I got to do character research for the first and boy was it fun.
For Agent 47, I just did a first wave of drawing then another, and selected. In the end, the ‘young hitman’ was cut and we selected the older hitman. This was straightforward but fun exercise.
For the handler, which was an original female character, I was given a bunch of seemingly disparate refs and had to come up with an "ethnic cyberpunk" slightly pastiche character. So of course I put a Vive on her. We did a lot of back and forth about detail and it was really rewarding.
Expressions
Once we made the final choices, my next job was the clean the sketches up. Because I didn't have a tablet, my pipelie became relied on scanners and the power of the color blue. I would..
1. Scan the sketch then coloring it blue in Pain.net
2. Print the result and do a line/clean up of it using black pens
3. Scan the result and remove blue layer using color curves tool so only the clean part remained.
After that, I would erase digitally the parts that would be impacted by expressions (eyes. eyebrow and mouth) and
1. Create a 3×4 grid of the clean outline of that, that would fit on A4
2. Print them and fill the template with expressions in pencil and ink
3. Scan them back and removed the ‘common’ part using the color curves trick
4. realign with the portrait.
In parallel, I had done a color pass on the main portrait - and for each expression fragment, I added a color layer that sat below line layer; taking care to adjust shades/skin tone to fill potential gaps.
The rest of the process was Rilen giving me notes on existing expressions and asking me to add new ones. Once the base plate and pipeline was done, this was very, very agile.
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Background/Props.
I ended up doing background because the 3D artist either didn’t have time or the skillset to put a lot of details in.
I’m bad at perspective and lighting and have no 3d skills, so I offered doing paint-overs since the background would be static anyway. I ended using a similar pipeline as for character:
1. I would print out 3 duplicate of the 3d render
2. go to town with ink and watercolor on them, offering different dressing to the director
3. scan them, darken them then overlay them at 50% opacity on the original render.
I think the results looked pretty unique and worked really well in some instances.
Tools: blue pencil, ink, watercolor, a scanner and Paint.NET.
Take Aways
Doing content for somebody else game was a revelation: it was liberating to not worry wether it was fair or not to have code suffer from focusing on content, and it was exhilarating to solve art design challenges; while leaving the decision of what was successful or good enough to Rilen.
All in all, I had a blast: I got to do character research based on a creative direction, figure out pipelines and not care about coding; which made me realized that though I was very drawn to system making; I could still generate content… provided I didn’t have to also care about systems.
Our effort and communication fizzled out in January when Rilen put the final version together, so the result has some big pieces, but can play it on Itch.io!
(please click several times in the viewport if it remains black/white at the beginning. And play with sound, we had pretty good voice over 🙂 )